CAD History - Part 3

The 'solid' years.. It was 1999 when we were first exposed to SolidEdge. My co-worker and I attended a hands-on presentation in Spartanburg SC. We were impressed! Mechanical Desktop always felt like a DOS program running in a window but here was a CAD program that had been designed from the ground up for Windows. It was still a year before Byers made the switch to SolidEdge. It had a steep learning curve but it was completely different from what we were using. My 'new' co-worker attended the training classes in Asheville and gradually eased ourselves into production with the program. For the first year our CAD time was spent equally in Mechanical Desktop & SolidEdge. Any new projects were done in SolidEdge, and changes to existing projects were done in Mechanical Desktop. 'Z' space 'E' is a very hard habit to break and even to this day I sometimes find myself typing this in SolidWorks...it just beeps at me.

We did see a demo of SolidWorks before the decision was made to go with SolidEdge. At the time we felt that SolidEdge had better sheet metal tools than SolidWorks. I can't speak about current versions of SolidEdge but back then the modeling process was similar to SolidWorks, you sketch, you extrude, sketch, cut, etc. I do remember that the assembly creation was a PITA compared to SolidWorks but it was better than Mechanical Desktop.

We used SolidEdge for maybe 3 years and then switched to SolidWorks. I am still confused to this day why the change was made. We were just starting to really get the hang of SolidEdge. My Co-worker and I both recommended that we stay with SolidEdge but the owner thought different. I am sure that the SolidEdge product had matured into a very capable product by now just as SolidWorks has. In the long run I guess I’m glad the change was made since I really do like SolidWorks but still I wonder about the decision making process that was employed when we switched.

Next BLOG….TBD