DISQUS

Bruce Buck · 1 year ago

All great ideas, many of them I've used and they helped tremendously. All I would add is structure your model design based on your manufacturing processes. So castings, extrusions, injection molded parts, sheetmetal, weldments, softgoods/fabrics, would all have their own set of rules/procedures on how to setup and structure the model, based on the needs of your particular company.

The next would be DOCUMENTATION!!!! You need to DOCUMENT everything that you've outlined above, so that ANYONE or any new employee can refer to it and see exactly what they're supposed to do.

You're absolutely right about a passionate employee, but unfortunately not everyone is as pumped up as the rabid CAD-masters roaming the office. So on TOP of having documentation, you need to have periodic meetings with EVERYONE involved with the systems. Get their feedback, give training, adjust your procedures/structure as necessary. Many times, as you go along, you'll find that what you thought was a great idea in the beginning, it turning out to be a nightmare and hurt productivity, so you may need to regroup, rethink and adjust your plan of attack to get thing moving along. And even then, you're going to have people who just won't follow the rules and do their own thing. Best you can do is try to work with them, accommodate them, or just send Josh to come whoop them into shape! :)

MikeO · 1 year ago

Library parts are the greatest things since Jagerbombs, er sliced bread. This in itself put's Pro/Engineer to pasture. No path statements it's just there.

What I don't like about SolidWorks library hardware is they are still not completely defined once inserted, you need to add a relation to keep them from spinning in place. Our models have a lot of hardware, PEM and Screws, and it's a pain going through all of this. I've submitted this to SolidWorks as an improvement, guess we'll see.

Len K. Mar · 1 year ago

My pet peeve with existing libraries is as follows:
After going through the selection process to get the right model I then have to manually enter information such as Description, Material, Vendor, Part Number, etc...
There is nothing more frustrating than having 10 identical hardware components all named something different.

Why can't this selection information populate the configuration properties of the library model upon creation instead of the user's having to manually re-enter the same information used to select the part.

Josh · 1 year ago

Len, Hi, you should be able to get the same properties when you insert the library part. You will need to open the original part and add the properties, save it back and then reference that model each time you use it in your assembly. Hope I'm understanding you correctly. If not, let me know what 'existing libraries' you are talking about and where the models are being accessed from. Thanks!

ian · 1 year ago

I have a question,

If you have a team that is new to SolidWorks who have run amok with their part and sub-assembly files (i.e. saving parts and sub-assems in different folders on a server; no libraries used) what's the best way to clean up the mess?

I've become the "computer cad guy" for our university project, and we're all used to pro/e since that's what is normally used through out the ME department here.

Josh · 1 year ago

Ian, in this case I would bring everything into a central directory, then go to File, Pack and Go and start putting the top level assemblies and drawing (with their associated files) into a directory structure (or PDM system) for your company. This is about the single quickest way to resolve problems with data in multiple locations. hope this helps your team!