Sunday, April 27, 2008

Solidworks Design Table for a Part

Design tables are a powerful way to manipulate properties, features, sketches, drawings, and assemblies. This is a demonstration on how to control dimensions and features in a part.


Solidworks Design Table for a Part from Caleb Stoll on Vimeo.

Solidworks Animation

This is a product I worked on that was a lot of fun. The animation at the beginning of this was mostly done in Solidworks. IM5 LAUNCHER

Solidworks Enhancement Requests

I have ideas every once in a while and for some reason I just expect Solidworks to do it. Then it does not and I think that would be a great feature. 10 seconds later I forget what it was. Here are 2 that I remembered.

1. Symmetry Mates similar to the relations in a sketch. If this could be setup with using planes and surfaces for symmetry it would be very useful for relating parts to one another without getting fancy about it.

2. Drive text in sketches with a design table. This would be especially useful when you have many different configurations with a particular part number for each length etched in the part. Currently, a feature for each P/N has to be created and then Suppressed or Resolved accordingly. If there were 60 configurations that would save 59 features.

If anyone has ideas about these let me know.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Animation of house

This year has been an interesting year in my life personally. We adopted from Ethiopia and our adoption was so unique and twisted we were mentioned in the front page article of the NYT's and IHT. Now we have three wonderful children adopted from Ethiopia. While I was bored out of my mind staying at a guest house people would call and try to reserve rooms but the language barrier was too much a lot of times. My solution was to model the house and make the video accessible on the internet. That way people can call and know exactly what they want without relying on explanations of each room. I had great aspirations for the animation but I have to post this because I was not getting around to working on a better animation.


Untitled from Caleb Stoll on Vimeo.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Copying Sketches

If you spend time re-sketching sketches for mating parts or even within a part this tip or trick is for you! It can save a lot of time and can be used for so many different applications.

Monday, April 7, 2008

Solidworks Sketch Picture Scaling

Insert pictures into sketches to quickly sketch over a part with complex features that are not easy to measure from the physical model. This is a demonstration on how to quickly and accurately scale imported pictures in a sketch quickly. Always physically verify the dimensions unless it is being used as a representation.

Solidworks Balloon Animation

This is an animation of a balloon expanding. The balloon part has an equation related to the distance of another part as it stretches and fills. I will post a demo on how to create an animation with an equation for this in the future.

Friday, April 4, 2008

Solidworks Tip for Toolbars

I always get so frustrated when I sit down on another machine and run into this particular toolbar issue. I have seen users so mnay times swear they could not find "replace component" in an assembly by right-clicking on a part. Well, it is there but you may have to click on the arrow at the bottom of the list to expand the menu. This is a tip so those menus will always be fully expanded.

Solidworks Arc Dimension

This is a very quick demo on how to add an arc length dimension into a sketch or drawing. I always forget how to do it.

Solidworks Asssembly Animation of Chain on Path

This is a demo on how to make a part follow a predetermined path. In this case it is similar to a bicycle chain path. Use a surface extrude for the path and then that part can be hidden in the assembly and nobody will ever know it was there. Super!!

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