May 04
SolidWorks has learned a pretty neat new trick from the Composer: balloons can now be attached to Magnetic Lines in SolidWorks 2012, giving designers more control over the alignment and spacing of balloons in drawings.
May 01
You may have seen this before, create a detail or section view and it is automatically named View A, great. Except oops that wasn’t the view I wanted so I delete View A and start again … except now the new view is automatically named View B. It’s not the end of the world, I can manually change the view name back to A, but from this point on each new detail or section view I create will automatically generate with the wrong letter. A new option in SolidWorks 2012 can now allow you to change this behavior.
Apr 23
Whenever you go to make a drawing of a part or assembly you have created in SolidWorks, you are presented with a set of predetermined views to chose from, front, top, isometric etc. But what if the view you want to use isn’t in that list? How can you get a drawing view on the sheet in a non standard orientation? One way to do this is to use a custom view.
Mar 18
The Drawing View Palette is a great way to add standard drawing views to your SolidWorks document. As you drag and drop the Top, Right, Front or other views onto the drawing sheet they disappear from the list. A common question that new users ask is how to get drawing views that have been placed on the sheet but later deleted to be available again on the View Palette.
Dec 20
As you may know, a Drawing Template stores all of the Document Properties settings that you need. It also contains a Sheet Format file containing your border and title block information. For more details about these two file types, you can read through http://www.javelin-tech.com/blog/2012/01/drawing-templates-sheet-formats/.
The Drawing Template actually stores the Sheet Format in any active sheets when the template was saved. However creating a new sheet in a drawing will look to the Sheet Format reference. If this reference cannot be found, it must be updated in the Sheet Properties. Watch the video below to see how to relink the reference.
Dec 17
Do worries about non-sequential drawing balloons keep you up at night? No? Well you still might like a new enhancement that was introduced in SolidWorks 2012 that allows you order the item numbers in drawing balloons sequentially.
Sep 18
When using “Insert Model Items” to import model dimensions into a drawing, the results sometimes be can be less the desirable, and moving dimensions to the correct views and location can be time consuming and laborious.
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Mar 05
The BOM Description column picks up the Description property from your models. But if you are finding that modifying the property is not updating the BOM, there is a good chance you have other Descriptions that are overriding the value. Here is the hierarchy of the Description column. These options allow you to have different descriptions for each configuration. Read More »
Nov 14
If you’re constantly adding the same annotations to your drawings, save some time and add them to the Design Library. This gives you quick access to drag and drop them on your drawings. In the Design Library tab, click the upper left button “Add to Library”. Add Notes, Surface Finish symbols, Weld Symbols, and Blocks.
If you have a custom symbol, create the geometry with sketch entities and notes. Combine these into a block and save the block into the Library. Read More »
Nov 07
While teaching a SolidWorks Essentials course, I had a student show me a drafting trick that I had not seen before.
