CATI Tech Notes

Features Vs. Mates

When working in assemblies, you are mostly dealing with adding and assembling mates.  However, by default in SolidWorks, when you expand a part or subassembly in a main assembly, you see the features of the part or the components of the subassembly.  The mates that exist in the main assembly are grouped in a folder at the beneath the file name.  You can then expand this to see the mates that part/subassembly has.

I find this to be kind of a pain because you have to expand 2 plus signs to get access to the information you want (the mates).  You then also have to deal with a longer scroll bar as all the features get shown.  So, when working with assemblies, there is a setting I like to use in SolidWorks to making managing my mates easier.  The setting is called View Mates and Dependencies and is found by right clicking on the top of the tree (the main assembly name) and going to Tree Display.

You can either have the FeatureManager Design tree set to View Features or set to View Mates and Dependencies.  With it set to View Mates and Dependencies, when you expand a part/subassembly, you see the mates and all the features get grouped into a folder.

 

I find this much easier for working with assemblies, so check it out and see if you like it too.  It is a system setting, so if you change it on one assembly, it will change on all assemblies you open.

Leslie Lougheed

Regional Technical Manager

Computer Aided Technology

Importing Tips

I just wanted to throw out a quick heads up to our users.  I have been getting a lot of questions about some of the surfacing tricks that support uses on imported geometry.  I threw a couple of things together in a quick video that I hope will help.  If there are any other video suggestions please let me know.

The videos can be found on the support videos portion of our site.

Thanks,

Keith Schaefer

Huge Fasteners!

Have you ever opened an assembly only to find the fasteners in it are huge?  This happens a lot when working in a multi-user environment and a network toolbox is not in use.  By default, toolbox files are installed locally on your machine with SolidWorks.  There is a default part file for each fastener type (the huge fastener you see).  Each time that you put in a fastener, a configuration gets written to that fastener of the particular size that you chose.  This works great so far!

The problem comes when someone else tries to open the assembly you made on their machine.  They also have a toolbox installed on their machine.  However, they might not have used the same size fasteners that you have yet.  This means that the configuration for the particular sizes in your assembly might not exist on their machines.  So when they go to open the assembly, the assembly opens with the default part file since the correct configuration size does not exist on their machine. This default part file is a huge fastener.    

So, what do we do about this?  The ideal thing to do is to use a network Toolbox.  That way everyone is using one set of files to create fasteners and everyone has access to all sizes that have been used.  What you will want to do is copy the toolbox from the person’s machine that has created the most sizes of fasteners.  Unfortunately, you will inevitably be missing some fastener sizes (we will deal with this in a bit), but there is no way to combine multiple toolboxes into one.  On that person’s machine, go to Tools>Options>Hole Wizard/Toolbox to find the location of the existing toolbox. 

By default, this folder is installed as SolidWorks Data.  Browse to this location in Windows Explorer and copy this entire SolidWorks Data folder to a network location.  

Then you will need to go to each users machine, and point the path in Tools>Options>Hole Wizard/Toolbox to this network SolidWorks Data folder. 

So I mentioned that we will still probably be missing some fastener sizes, since we had to pull just one person’s Toolbox.  There is an easy fix to have SolidWorks create the fastener sizes for us when we open the assemblies. If you open an assembly that uses a fastener size that the Toolbox does not have, you will be prompted to have Toolbox automatically create the missing size. 

Always click yes!  Why wouldn’t we let SolidWorks create the size for us?   

Design Better

Leslie Lougheed

Regional Technical Manager

TO DELETE SELECT AND HIT THE DELETE KEY........................ OR THE ENTER KEY?

While working on some projects a couple of months ago I was changing my registry settings in SolidWorks and trying different things to try and reproduce some issue or issues that one of our customers was experiencing. In my haste to diagnose the problem something interesting happened. When I selected the item inside of SolidWorks and hit the delete key absolutely NOTHING happened. I thought to myself "Wow that's really strange." No matter what I did I could not delete anything with the delete key.

Sketches, features, planes, nuthin. Ughhhhhhhhhhh. 

 

Now, I could right click and get the delete from there, but what a pain. After some time of beating my head up against the wall, table, desk and every other hard surface available, I decided before I deleted my registry or re-installed SolidWorks to fix the "problem," I would look in the customize settings and hit the keyboard shortcuts. They wouldn't do that would they?

The default setting should look something like this:

 Mine however had this going on:

  

So this now begs the question? And the answer is yes...........

Todd Werginz

Technical Analyst

Computer Aided Technology

Help with Help files !!

We often tend to look up help of software for information that either isn’t intuitive or we are confused about. But more often than not we have to access the software itself to get to the help menu.  Wouldn’t it be nice to have help at your beck and call as it should be.

You can have the help menu show up in Start \ All Programs menu \ SolidWorks 2009 \ Help \

 

To do this

1.     browse to C:\Documents and Settings\” user name on machine ”\Start Menu\Programs\

2.      Right click and create a new folder called “Help”

3.     In this folder create a shortcut to the help file (*.chm file) for Solid Works Help. This is usually where the software is installed. C:\ProgramFiles\SolidWorks\SolidWorks\lang\english\sldworks.chm

4.     Similarly create shortcuts to all the help files you might want in there.

 Eg COSMOS works  C:\Program Files\SolidWorks\COSMOSWorks\Help\cworks.chm

 

Now you can drag and drop the Help menu created in the Program files menu under SolidWorks folder.

Machine specifications

Many a times users need to know their machine specifications in a quick and easy manner. If you hit windows button on the keyboard+ Pause key; machines System Properties of coming up.  The other method to bring this up is right click on My Computer and click on properties. 

Rajat Trehan

Product Manager – Design Validation

Computer Aided Technology Inc.