Alin’s SolidWorks 2014 Tutorial: Total Control When Deleting Features [VIDEO]

There are people who say that while SolidWorks excels in creating a new model from scratch, sometimes it is quite complicated to use for modifying an existing part. Let’s consider three of the most frequent questions:

1. What if you want to do a radical change to a shape?
2. What if you need to completely modify the whole “manufacturing” process of a specific part and for that would even have to change the type of the existing features (i.e. replace a Boss-Extrude with a Revolve)? What would happen with the children of the features that get deleted?
3. What if you want to do complex changes to existing bodies (even “dumb” solids or surfaces)?

Good News! In the last 5 years, SolidWorks introduced amazing functionality for addressing these needs. SolidWorks 2014 in particular has perfected this functionality, making these design changes a breeze. Let’s find the answers to the three questions.

1. I provided the answer to the first question in this blog post, demonstrating how easy it is to replace sketch entities without affecting any dependents.
2. Please watch this video in order to see how easy it is to change the type of features used in modeling a part. The workflow is very intuitive and you will love the new functionality that empowers the users to select which children get deleted when removing parent features.
3. In my next blog post I will show you how to use the powerful direct editing tools available in SolidWorks 2014.