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…

Notes from Matt's Presentation

Since Matt mentioned it I now feel obligated to post some of my notes from his presentation at last week’s user group meeting. I started to just scan the page I took the notes on but I can’t let just anyone see my ‘creative’ doodles until I get the copy write on them. I hope you all are not expecting much…

1. You can create planes within a 3D sketch. This is how you get the feature count down when competing in a modeling contest. This means you can create the geometry for multiple cuts / extrudes from different planes. Of course all the cuts or extrudes must go in the same direction. The example Matt demonstrated would have been 4 or 5 separate features (the way I model parts) compressed to one.
2. Turn on the View ports when sketching in 3D. Add the 4-viewport button to a toolbar. With the 4 view ports you can start a line in one view, click the endpoint in another view and etc. This a great visual aid when doing 3D sketches for routing.
3. To constrain a point or endpoint, dimension from the 3 standard planes.
4. Create a plane parallel to the screen view. Rotate the view to where you want it. Start a 3D sketch; draw 3 points at random on the screen. Constrain them to be coincident (3 points right on top of each other). Break the relations and then move the 3 points apart. Exit the sketch and create a plane using the 3 points. This works because when you move a point it only moves in x-y relative to the screen view, cool stuff.
5. I was able to ask my question: If 3 points can define a circle and 3 points can define a plane, why can’t a circle define a plane? This is possible in the real world but not straight up in SolidWorks. I would think it would be an option on the reference plane creation dialogue box. But Matt explained that you can do it with 3D Sketches. You simply start a 3D sketch, place 3 points on the circular edge where you want the plane and then use the 3-point plane creation.
6. Matt also talked about the difference between the old ‘layout sketch’ and the new SolidWorks feature, Layout Sketch.
7. We also discussed the mistake that we’ve all made when working within an assembly. Forget to change to edit part mode and just start sketching on a face and expect the resulting feature to be placed on the part at the part level. And if there was anyway to ‘move’ this feature to the part level. That’s all I can say about that!
   

There was much more covered in the meeting these are the things that made an impression on me. I might have gotten more out of it but my sinuses decided to go into convulsions in the middle of the meeting and I was struggling to maintain control with an over used handkerchief I just happened to have in my back pocket. What did you remember and will you share it by leaving a comment?

3D sketches, Windows 7, and TGIF

First things first, as usual Matt Lombard was exceptional last night. He is the type of guy you want to hang around with just hoping that some of his expertise will rub off on you. The results of our first modeling contest dictated that our members as a whole needed help with 3D sketches, so on the fly Matt changed his hints & tips presentation into a seminar on 3d sketches. This guy is awesome; if he wasn’t married he’d be meeting my oldest daughter! Keep watching this space for more detailed info as I try to make sense of the few notes I took.

A few blogs ago I discussed Windows XP versus Vista. For all you who are still riding on the XP bandwagon (that would be me) you will want to read this:

Keep XP fresh until Windows 7 Arives

The computer and network upgrade process at Byers Precision is proceeding with some urgency now. In the last few weeks we have had a rash of computer and server issues that has led to at least 100 hours of lost work…that we know of. We’ve been in contact with Dell and had one of their 3^rd party evaluators out for site inspection. Our workstations were hand built about 4 years ago using what we thought were quality components, not top of the line mind you but highly rated for their price. But as with all things they break. We had all the info we needed to proceed with an order to Dell when the owner decides that maybe we ought to talk to HP also. The gentleman in charge of putting all this together was very upset to say the least.

The Power of a Blog

The Power of a Blog

If you follow Matt’s Blog you have seen the power blogging at its best. What is ‘Power Blogging’? It is blogging that causes change. Matt voiced an opinion about a SolidWorks Corporation practice, we commented, SolidWorks listened and the practice was changed. As Matt points out it wasn’t necessarily only what he wrote but the reaction from us, his readers and users of the software.

You might have seen on the news in the last few days about the woman’s blog that tells all the crimes her ex-husband committed while in the armed forces. I also read that somewhere about a blog being shutdown by lawsuits from a party named in the blog.

If you listen to Twit (This Week in Tech) you have heard the panelists discussing the validity of blogs as reliable news sources. And recently it’s been all about Twitter which is blogging on a minute by minute basis. Is the information presented in blogs to be taken as news, opinions or entertainment?

To pull all these thoughts together I have but one comment; as bloggers we need to use this new found power responsibility, and as readers we need to carefully glean what we read separating fact from fiction and rants from legitimate concerns.