Welcome back to a new week filled with SolidWorks tips and tricks. Over the next couple of post we’ll be concentrating on SolidWorks Bill of Materials. SolidWorks 2008 brought some changes on how one uses BOMs in the drawing environment. A lot of the controls for BOMs that were previously available in the PropertyManager are [...]

Earlier this month for Standards Tuesday, I spent a couple of weeks describing BOMs per ASME Y14.34-1996. If you missed them I highly recommend you go back and read those post since they cover a lot of information that would be helpful in creating your own BOM template, see Standards Tuesday – Bill of Materials [...]

Today my kiddies, we begin covering the application of dimensions as described in Section 1.7 of ASME Y14.5M-1994. There is a lot of information to cover so I will break it up over 2 weeks. Like I said before ASME standards are easy to handle in small doses. So pinch your nose and hold your [...]

We have all had them, extraordinarily large assemblies that brings your computer to it’s virtual knees every time you open them. Sometimes you just want to work on a small area and opening an assembly is painfully slow. In 2008, SolidWorks introduced a new tool to help you in these situations: Quick view / Selective [...]

Earlier this month I wrote about Component Selection Tools in Assemblies and I left out a couple of new selection tools in 2008. Today We will cover those missing selection tools; Show Hidden Components, Advanced Select & Select Sub Assembly. These selection tools will come in handy later this week when we cover Quick View [...]

Over the past few weeks I have written about the different ASME standards that impact areas of your drawing including the Drawing Title, General Notes & BOMs.  All of these pale in comparison to ASME Y14.5M-1994, Dimensioning and Tolerancing. I live by this standard; it has been both good to me and the bane of [...]

This is for all those who proclaimed in high school algebra, “I will never use this…” We use equations every day, even if you don’t know it. My paycheck is ‘X‘ and my bills are ‘Y‘ , money for fun stuff is X-Y= -Z …D’oh!. SolidWorks has the ability to use equations that can be [...]

After reading Part 1 and Part 2 of The Appearance of Things, I hope you have found it easier to change the appearance of your parts. Now I am going to show you how to tie it all together using Display States. Like Appearance Callouts and the Display Pane, Display States are nothing new but [...]

The very first post I did when I started this blog was about getting rid of the drawing sheet background in SolidWorks 2008. At the time I was under the impression that there was no way to turn off the ‘crumpled’ paper look of a drawing. I was feeling pretty good about myself when I [...]

Earlier this week I ‘reintroduced’ Appearance Callouts in The Appearance of Things – Appearance Callouts. If you haven’t read it yet, I would recommend that you read Monday’s post before carrying on here. For the second part of our three part series, I will be covering the Display Pane. The Display Pane provides a simple [...]