SOLIDWORKS SHEET METAL TOOLS CAN DESIGN PRODUCT PACKAGING An egg of such grandeur deserves a luxury home. SOLIDWORKS Sheet Metal tools can be applied to a cardboard medium to produce intricate and functional packaging designs. Employing multibody part design, we took the geometry of the egg to produce an accurate and parametric packaging design that can be easily updated if changes are needed and configured for different sizes. To quickly create the correct basic geometry for the design, we created a simple solid hexagonal boss to enclose the whole egg, allowing space around the egg for packag ..read more

When is it? Join the DriveWorks Community virtually at DriveWorks World 2024 April 10th – 11th. What sessions can I expect to see? This year DriveWorks has gone all out planning 100+ sessions that benefit technical users, as well as sales and marketing. There are technical sessions ranging from beginner lessons to help develop new skills and confidence, as well as advanced sessions for long time users of the software who are looking to take their projects to the next level. DriveWorks World is a free way to network, learn, and discover new ways to use the tools you already own. Learning sessio ..read more

#1 – Collaboration A recent Tech Clarity White Paper opens, stating... “Collaboration impacts every part of product development, and products cannot be developed or brought to market without it. It involves working as a team with multiple groups and departments, both internal and external to the organization. It requires successful co-ordination of processes, data, knowledge, ideas, schedules, communications, and more.” An easily navigable common platform, with permissions and access controls is a great way to improve collaboration and reduce your time to market. With SOLIDWORKS PDM, you can ..read more

CONTENTS Choose the Right Graphics Card Ensure Correct Setup Update Graphics Drivers Adjust Your SOLIDWORKS Settings Optimise File-Specific Settings #1 - Choose the Right Graphics Card The biggest boost for SOLIDWORKS performance comes from your graphics card. We typically recommend opting for NVIDIA's professional range of graphics cards. These cards are tested with SOLIDWORKS and can be relied upon to do the heavy lifting for you, especially the Ada generation of cards. The RTX 3000 and RTX 4000 series offer what we believe to be the best price-to-performance ratio in 2024, but if you’re d ..read more

A SHORTCUT FOR ADDING NEW PLANES This water bottle design needs some water level markers adding to the translucent window on the side. There are two unmerged bodies in this model, so we’ll need to use the intersect command, a new plane, and a little bit of iterative design. Firstly, we’ll add the new plane by selecting the top plane and CTRL + dragging one of the blue points to create a parallel copy. An offset of 100mm will do us for now - we’ll use this plane to evaluate the volume at this height, so we’ll also rename it to ‘Fill Level’. USING INTERSECT TO FIND VOLUMES IN SOLIDW ..read more

CONTENTS Peter Jones (ILG) Ltd. – Durable Carrying Solutions Curtiss-Wright – Heavy Machinery DMM Engineering – Climbing Equipment Industrial Engineering Services – Bespoke Fabrication Peter Jones (ILG) Ltd Founded in 1967, Peter Jones is a leading designer and manufacturer of innovative carrying solutions. Specialising in high-quality leather and modern plastic moulded components, they serve diverse sectors including police, fire, ambulance, prisons, search & rescue, security, and worker safety industries. Their clients are across the global, supplying directly to device manufacturers ..read more

Marc has been able to model welding for more than 20 years. It was developed as a result of customer requests as the potential savings from predicting welded structure behaviour virtually (over physical prototypes and manual iteration) were recognised. MSC Marc can help to validate and inform decisions, for example, the use of a stitch welding scheme to minimise distortion. We’ll be looking at the capability within the standard Marc solver, but there is a custom implementation, Simufact Welding, that is aimed at the manufacturing engineer rather than the FEA specialist. So what do you need to ..read more

CONTENTS Assembly Visualisation Improved PDM Add-In Latest vs Cached Information in Version Tab File Details & Operations Enhanced Check Out Functionality License Node Access Extra Data Card Control Workflow Cleanup Surfing Web 2.0 SOLIDWORKS Manage File Previews Improved BoM Creation & Management SOLIDWORKS Cloud Services #1 – ASSEMBLY VISUALISATION You can now visually represent your PDM variables in your model with the improved Assembly Visualization tool in SOLIDWORKS. This can link up to your PDM variables, even those which aren’t connected to SOLIDWORKS custom properties and s ..read more

To create a virtual sharp in an open sketch, hold down the CTRL key and select two sketch entities. Select the Point command from the Sketch toolbar in the Command Manager and a virtual sharp is created at the point where the sketch entities would intersect. The Smart Dimension tool offers an alternative method to add virtual sharps to sketches. Select the Smart Dimension tool, then right click on the first sketch entity and select Find Intersection. Now select the second sketch entity and the virtual sharp will be created and selected automatically, ready for you to select the second d ..read more

4 WAYS TO ADD CUSTOM PROPERTIES IN SOLIDWORKS File Properties Custom Property Tab Builder Task Automation SOLIDWORKS PDM Data Cards   #1 - FILE PROPERTIES The first and most commonly used way to create file properties is from the File > Properties menu. In the pop-up dialog, use the drop-down menus to add the appropriate fields and values, or type in your own. Customising this list is covered in the SOLIDWORKS Drawings training course, where you’ll also learn to set up and create drawing borders and templates. You might also link a property to a standard value, such as SW-Mass or S ..read more