SOLIDWORKS Rebuild Commands

When you are working with SOLIDWORKS you may see the rebuild icon next to some of the features every once in a while. This means that SOLIDWORKS needs to rebuild the model in order for the dimensional changes to take effect.

Rebuild traffic light on the Fillet1 feature

The SOLIDWORKS Rebuild Command

To ask SOLIDWORKS to rebuild a model one can click on the rebuild icon from the standard toolbar, or click on rebuild under the Edit menu, or press Ctrl + B. This command rebuilds the features that have changed since the last save.

SOLIDWORKS Rebuild

Force Rebuild Command

But sometimes that is not enough. For example, imagine some of data in your model has been corrupted (and that could happen due to numerous reasons). In that case rebuilding your model will not fix the issue as the rebuild command only rebuild the features that have been changed. In this case you need to use the other SOLIDWORKS rebuild command called Force Rebuild.

Force Rebuild command rebuilds every single feature in the design tree and as a result refresh the entire database of geometry. Unfortunately, there is no icon nor menu choice in SOLIDWORKS to execute that command. The only way that you can run Force Rebuild is by using Ctrl + Q shortcut key.

Verification on Rebuild setting

While we are on this topic it is worth mentioning a setting that helps identify problems when making a model. It is called Verification on Rebuild and you can find more information about it in this post.