Announcing the First SolidWorks Geek Contest!

Posted on June 30th, 2008 in Contest, Misc by admin

How would like to have the 28th edition of the Machinery’s Handbook, the book often touted as being the bible of mechanical industries? Even better how would like like to win your own copy for free? This month, in an act of shameless self promotion, the SolidWorks Geek is holding it’s very first contest. At the end of the month one lucky RSS reader will win a brand-spanking new copy of the 28th Edition of the Machinery’s Handbook, pictured below:

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Using BOMs in SolidWorks 2008

Posted on June 30th, 2008 in Assemblies, Drawings, SolidWorks, System Options by The SW Geek

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 now available in the BOM. Using the BOM template we created last week on Creating Your BOM Template with a few further tweaks, we will go over the changes that applies to BOMs in 2008. Feel free to use any BOM template you choose since there is nothing custom about what we are going to do today.

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Creating Your BOM Template

Posted on June 27th, 2008 in Assemblies, Customize, Drawings, SolidWorks by The SW Geek

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 and Standards Tuesday - Bill of Materials Pt2. Today we will be covering creating a BOM template per your own company standards. The settings and BOM configuration I will be illustrating here by no means is the only or best way to set-up a BOM they are merely my own personal preferences.

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Standards Tuesday - Application of Dimensions

Posted on June 24th, 2008 in Dimensions, Drawings, Standards by The SW Geek

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 breath, here comes your weekly dose of ASME goodness.

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Selectively Opening Components in Your Assembly

Posted on June 23rd, 2008 in Assemblies, Productivity, SolidWorks by The SW Geek

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 open. The Selective open tool opens your assembly with only minimal model information being loaded into memory, allowing you to select which components in the assembly you wish to open. When accepted, only the selected components will be shown but all your mates will be retained; allowing you to work on your assembly without killing you poor little computer.

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More Selection Methods

Posted on June 18th, 2008 in Assemblies, Productivity, Selection Tools, SolidWorks by The SW Geek

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 / Selective Open.

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Standards Tuesday - Fundamental Rules of Dimensioning

Posted on June 17th, 2008 in Dimensions, Drawings, Standards by The SW Geek

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 my existence. For the rest of you who actually have lives and don’t like to spend their free time reading standards, I am here to help. Over the coming weeks I will be covering various aspects of everyone’s favorite standard.

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Sum Simple Equations

Posted on June 16th, 2008 in Dimensions, Models, Productivity, Sketches, SolidWorks by The SW Geek

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 anywhere from very simple equations and variables, all the way up to very complex equations. Admittedly, I can not do the more complex equations, even though SolidWorks can handle it, but I do use equations almost everyday. Today I will show you some simple equations tricks that you may end up using daily as well.

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The Appearance of Things - Display States

Posted on June 13th, 2008 in Assemblies, Configurations, Productivity, SolidWorks, ToolBars, User Interface by The SW Geek

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 I do not see nearly enough people using them. I see way too many people using configurations to control the display of assemblies when Display States are way better. Creating configurations to hide and show components works fine but it can be slower then using Display States. Changing configurations reloads each component as if it were a new one, Display States doesn’t load components.

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Drawing Sheet Background in SolidWorks 2008 - Revisited

Posted on June 12th, 2008 in Customize, Drawings, Misc, SolidWorks, System Options, User Interface by admin

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 wrote the post about removing the BMP from the background. Imagine how embarrassed I was when one of my readers, Christian Tjarnberg, corrected me on how to truly turn off the background. To be honest, it really bothered me that I made such a bone head mistake and I decided to do it right…the second time.

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