Articles by: Chris Briand, CSWE
A variety of techniques can be employed when building assemblies in SOLIDWORKS. In some cases the weldment module is used as the primary assembly environment, in other cases we see welded bodies being created as individual assembly components before they are placed together at the assembly level. In the end it often narrows down to…
One of the most common practices we run across while discussing weldment functionality with clients is the use of ‘Modeled Welds’ which are additional Solid Bodies that exist in the weldment file to represent the physical mass where a weld would exist — generally in a shape that the fillet bead tool cannot be applied,…
Redirected Folders seemed like a good idea at the time? If you are an IT administrator that is tasked with providing support to SOLIDWORKS users, one can often get caught up in the various conflicts that arise between SOLIDWORKS and it’s need for accessibility to the local system in order to function properly. This will…
Practical Values for approximating “Zero Radius” bends in SOLIDWORKS
I am as sure as the words posted here that every sheet metal designer has been asked to fudge some values to represent a “SOLIDWORKS Zero Radius” bend or a “SOLIDWORKS Sharp Corner” at some point along the way. As it turns out there is a procedure for ensuring sharp corners in SOLIDWORKS, however it…
SOLIDWORKS Automatic Solve order is Greyed out? If you have encountered any instances where the “Automatic Solve Order” for equations is disabled, it may be due to to a setting titled “Display potential circular references in equations:” The options that govern the possibilities for circular references in equations may be found under Tools >…
Every now and then, one of our fantastic support staff here at Javelin, run across a dialog that they have never seen before…. it’s a rare case to be sure. Especially rare if the features involved have been around forever and the dialog box itself has been available since the 2013 release of SOLIDWORKS. That…
In previous releases of SOLIDWORKS, the “Feature Freeze” bar would experience issues if it encountered a folder where the features were in chronological order. This limitation has been addressed with SOLIDWORKS 2018 so that the Feature Freeze bar can force a temporary “unabsorb” of a sketch or feature so that it can freeze the desired…
Is it the Correct Time for Me to Upgrade? Customers upgrade their SOLIDWORKS licenses for a manner of reasons. Those same reasons may be identical to the reasoning that another company or organization chooses not to upgrade. As the old adage goes “If it ain’t broke – don’t fix it”, and this approach by and…