Rapid Dimension Manipulator

Written by Lenny Vital | 11 July 2010

SolidWorks 2010 saw several cool interface improvements that may have been prematurely included. One of these was the Rapid Dimension Manipulator (or as I like to call it, the Dimension Pie; it’s just easier to say). The Dimension Pie appears at the mouse cursor location when the user inserts a dimension in a drawing view. It allows the user to quickly place dimensions along a chosen side at evenly spaced intervals.

Dimension Pie

Toolbox parts in PDMWorks

Written by Lenny Vital | 04 July 2010

While working my way through the PDMWorks Workgroup lessons in the training manual, I came across a bit of information about Toolbox parts that I never knew about before. Some of you may have known this already, but it was news for me.

If you’ve noticed, every time you add a Toolbox part to an assembly, the component shows up with a special icon in the Feature Manager that looks like a fastener and that is used to identify it as a Toolbox part. This is true regardless of it being a copy of the master file or a configuration. Well, that icon is associated with an internal flag that is placed in the file to identify it as a Toolbox part. An add-in, such as PDMWorks, reads the flag and uses this information to handle the part according to the rules that have been previously established by the Vault administrator.

If the Vault administrator allows it, users will be able to check the Toolbox parts into the Vault with the rest of the components of the assembly. This is not advisable, but it’s reasonable as long as your Toolbox components are copies of the master file and not configurations. However, more often than not, the Vault administrator will decide that users won’t be allowed to check Toolbox parts into the Vault and these components will be listed in the assembly as links and in a separate project in the Vault as Toolbox references and library components. The following image shows those two last options have been selected by the Vault administrator.

manipulating data

Written by Lenny Vital | 27 June 2010

Last week I received a bracket from a customer similar to the one shown in the picture below. They were asking us to figure out what the net weight of the part would be on a component like this, sounds simple enough right? I thought so until I realized that the model was designed out of .048” thick material and they were looking for results from and .052” thick material. It can’t ever just be an easy fix can it?

Quickly apply mesh controls

Written by Lenny Vital | 25 June 2010

Alright, so you have selected a bunch of faces for applying a load. Now you want to pick those same faces to apply a mesh control to them to make sure that you have accurate results. As you may already now a smaller element size in a region improves the accuracy of results in that region. It’s just a pain to re-select all those faces, right? Not really. I found this trick recently to help re-use that selection set.

For this example in the video below, select the faces that you want to restrain or add loads to in the normal way. It sometimes helps to select in wireframe mode and use a SolidWorks selection filter to grab all the faces of the model quickly. Use the “X” key to select “faces” quickly. Then apply the load or restraint as usual. Once that occurs and you set up the rest of the model, the selection set is then available for re-use. For example, to add a mesh control to reduce the element size on the selections for loads and restrains, simply pre-select the aforementioned load or restraint, rich click on the mesh icon in the Simulation Study Manager and choose Mesh Control. You will then notice that the faces are all selected as you would have hoped. I have not tried this in SolidWorks 2009, but it definitely works in SolidWorks 2010. This also has worked for quite some time in SolidWorks Flow Simulation.

change projected view to section view

Written by Lenny Vital | 21 June 2010

sometimes you may want convert a projected view to a section view.in other word ,you want the view with notes ,symbols ,dimensions change to a complete section view.is that possible in solidworks? the answer is positive.

in solidworks for the broken out section, it will point you into the spline tool where you can draw a boundary for the sectioned out area.

instead of drawing a small spline area for the broken out area, you can draw the spline all the way around the view, or even draw a rectangle before entering the broken out section command and then it will use that for the boundary.

The dimensions in the view that still make sense at the section depth still appear. in other words, dimensions to features which no longer appear in the view are removed automatically.

hope this little tips can help you.

i make the tutorials in video .