The Javelin Technologies Blog

When you rotate a clip in a SolidWorks Route you sometimes find that the route now has a loop in it.  Thankfully, there is an easy way to correct the problem.  Simply edit the route, right-click on the line segment through the clip and choose “Flip Direction”.  That’s it!  Close the route sketch and save.  See the images below.

Route with loop

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Occasionally you may want to move a connector (or flange for pipe) to a different location than it was originally dropped on.  You will find mates present on the component in the Feature Tree if the route sketch is not controlling the position of the connector.  However, there is no “edit” command available as there would be with a regular assembly mate.  All that is present is the “Replace Mate Entities” button.  This accomplishes the same thing, it allows you to update the referenced faces for the mates.  Simply walk through the tool and update the references to the new location.  The route should update once you have completed editing the necessary mates.  If it doesn’t try a rebuild or a CTRL+Q.

Connector to move

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When showing the electrical capabilities of E3.WireWorks to our customers I have had many of them ask me whether it is a suitable tool for doing other types of schematics as well. The types that are most commonly asked for are hydraulics and pneumatics but process design (P&ID) should not be excluded. A lot of the functionality that I show in electrical design carries directly over to these disciplines. Some examples include, quick connections, device naming, connection lists, bill of materials, etc.

Some of you may have seen the new SolidWorks 2011 functionality which leverages P&ID’s for automatically generating piping. You may have wondered where these P&ID’s come from… well, luckily E3.WireWorks has stepped up to the plate and has programmed a way to generate them based on the automatic connection list (look for that in future postings).

One of the things that really makes E3.WireWorks stand out is how good of job it does with having all of these disciplines in a single project. I have created a quick video to describe how this behaves so have a look and let me know what you think or if you have suggestions for future content:

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When Pipe Routing you may need to have an elbow that has a drain or weldolet on it.  This is actually easily accomplished.  Simply model the modified elbow and use the replace fitting command to swap it into the route.  Best results are likely achieved if you save a copy of your default elbow and modify it to suit and then swap in the copy. Read More »

To speed up the Pipe Routing process or simplify your library, it may help you to combine similar routing parts into one file.  You can make configurations with different Material Properties for example.  Just make sure to have the configuration specific routing property “Pipe Identifier” a discreet value for each configuration in the case of the pipe part file.  Also, you can use the “User Specified” Configuration properties option for the part number in the BOM  (See image below).  The BOM part number can also be entered into the Design Table if the part has one.

Configuration Properties

In SolidWorks Pipe Routing we can only specify one default elbow for the route subassembly.  Historically this  meant that if we have more than one angle of elbow in the route, we had to browse each time for every case not matching the default.  Now we have a couple of options to help out with this situation.

There are 2 special elbows in the default design library.  They are the ones with “compound” in the name.  These elbows have configurations for 45°, 90° and 180°.  As long as there is a configuration in the elbow part that matches the angle of the route, you will not have to browse for a new elbow part file. Read More »