Southeastern SolidWorks User Workshop: Day 2

Southeastern SolidWorks User Workshop: Day 2

I apologize for this being a day late. My excuse is that my brain shutdown last night at 5PM due to overload. The second day of the workshop was very intense for your friendly neighborhood blogger.

My first session of the day was Matt Lombard's presentation on Curvy Stuff. For someone who does sheet metal 99% of the time this was definitely uncharted territory. But I do have to say that I learned a lot and it makes me want to continue my studies in SolidWorks surfacing. Matt took us through the modeling of a pasta scoop which happened to be in his kitchen utensil drawer. We learned about projected curves, boundary surfaces, spline on a surface and the awesome fill surface. I have never used the fill surface command but it must be a really great tool since Matt was the first of two presenters to tout its usefulness.

Next I was in Steve Ostrovsky’s presentation on drawing templates and formats. Even though I knew the material fairly well Steve did point out some things that I could do in a more efficient manner than how I’m doing it now. This class was a hands on lab which invariably has problems with some of the participants not really being at the level of expertise that the material is geared for. I really feel for presenters when placed in this situation. But Steve did a great job of keeping everyone on track. On great tip I pick up here was how to do multi-line custom property descriptions on the drawing sheet format.

After the lunch break I attended Philip Thomas’ presentation on dumb solids. If you’ve ever sat in on one of Philip’s presentations you know what I mean when I say…WOW! Philip is hilarious and educational at the same time. He started out with a very informative history of CAD. Check out CADAZZ.com for some of the information he presented. Why the history lesson? It is necessary to know the history in order to understand the state of CAD interoperability today. We have different kernels, different philosophies and different ways of doing things among the various CAD software companies and even within the same company (Catia, SolidWorks). Philip pointed out that the difference between smart solids and dumb solids is just the amount of information embedded with the solid. He showed several examples and various ways of tackling the errors that the dumb solid might have. I picked up on some ideals that will help me the next time I get a Pro/E file I need to work with in SolidWorks.

And if one class with Philip wasn’t enough…I then attended his presentation on Keyboard Shortcuts. This session was more laid back that the previous one. Philip's Presentation came down to these pointers:

1. Quit banging on the keyboard – get a mouse with as many programmable buttons as you can remember and then program them.
2. Undo is Great – But cancel is better! – when you really mess up a sketch DON’T release the left mouse button, press and hold the right button, now release the left button and finally the right button. You sketch is back like it was before.
3. Wrap will split multiple faces in one go and there other ways to extrude text.
4. Don’t forget Cut-Sweep Solid.
5. The ‘parametize’ tool is very powerful, use the Dim Expert.
6. Make your presentations look good with RealView.
7. Know when to Eject! He gave us a .bat file that ends all SolidWorks processes.
8. Personalize – use the API. Philip showed us some really cool things that can be done with a little bit of VBA programming and Excel.
   

Thanks to all the presenters for sharing their knowledge with all of us attendees. I hope to someday make you proud enough to say, “Look at that guy go! I taught him everything he knows”.

All and all the 1^st SouthEastern SolidWorks User Workshop was a great success. I certainly hope that this will become a yearly event. Tony, I’m giving you a standing ovation as I type.

Pictures may be coming next…