CAD Forum

CarrieIves

And for a recommendation at a higher reading level, "A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet" by Becky Chambers was a fun science fiction novel with interesting aliens.

CarrieIves

This is a picture book I enjoyed reading with my kids. Seeing a couple of posts about people being afraid to call out bad ideas reminded me of "The Very Silly Mayor" by Tom Tomorrow. Unfortunately, it's out of print.

CarrieIves

https://r1132100503382-eu1-3dswym.3dexp ... 28fSY6hecg

CarrieIves

AlexLachance You say Texas or Florida sound nice, you'll enjoy your Canadian weather when we are having our long stretch of over 100F (38C) degree days in the summer. The hard part is we are in "random season" (October thru about March/April). I had pictures pop up from a few years ago wh...

CarrieIves

Here is what the line in my step macro says to set it to Step 214:

Code: Select all

'set STEP export as Step 214
stepversion = swApp.SetUserPreferenceIntegerValue(swUserPreferenceIntegerValue_e.swStepAP, 214)

Thanks,
Carrie

CarrieIves

We've been using Solid Professor for new hires. Based on this I feel like I have to go through them myself, if this is representative of the rest of it I think we'll be looking elsewhere. I have gone through a lot of their material. Questions that are not as clear as I think they should be is one t...

CarrieIves

AlexLachance If you are testing SolidWorks during your time off, you are doing your time off wrong. (says the person who kept checking her work email over the week of Thanksgiving when she was supposed to be on vacation) And are any of you using SW2024 with PDM? Does that seem to behave? I don't ha...

CarrieIves

Any opinions after y'all have been testing 2024 SP05?

CarrieIves

I would put most of your templates in PDM. We have our template folder do a get latest every time a user logs into PDM. It will then still be on your computer even if you are offline. You can work offline in PDM. Also, you can then control write access and see what changes you have made to the templ...

CarrieIves

Enjoy the daiquiri. You have earned it. When I completed my degree, I was planning on skipping the graduation, but my parents expected me to go. I went and was surprised by how much I enjoyed walking across that stage.

CarrieIves

I would bring in the DXF and not worry much about which plane it puts it on. Turn on the 2D to 3D toolbar. The first thing I would do is then edit the sketch to get rid of any notes or drawing format stuff if that came in. Do you have different things on layers in the DXF? They can each be brought i...

CarrieIves

Our VAR has a slightly higher subscription fee that comes with access to SolidProfessor and discounts on special services such as moving PDM to a new server and discounts on training. We can ask as many questions as we want. Even if we were at the standard subscription, I don't think they would care...

CarrieIves

We have sheet size, which I found helpful as long as it isn't the most bold thing in the title block. It looks like ASME Y14.1-2005 says to have the sheet size. (That's what I have a copy of)

It didn't talk about the note "DO NOT SCALE DRAWING".

CarrieIves

We are slowly merging two companies together. One has "DO NOT SCALE DRAWING" as part of the drawing template/format. One does not. How many of you are still adding that phrase on your drawings?

CarrieIves

It's been a few years since I used Windchill with SolidWorks. It has been getting better, but I definitely had similar issues to jcapriotti. I think I last used it in 2018 or 2019. I will say it was much more stable then than it was in 2015 or so when I started using it with SolidWorks. It was not u...

CarrieIves

It sounds to me like you have two things you need to keep track of - what part numbers have been assigned, and what file that number is in. I would track that outside of trying to do it just with SolidWorks. You need a master list somewhere that says what numbers have been assigned (this can be an e...

CarrieIves

I think you may have to set the file locations for each person. You can have shortcuts to those drives added to your OneDrive show they show up in your windows file explorer. I haven't tried having SolidWorks look to those locations. If you have PDM, this would be a great time to move all those file...

CarrieIves

Naming features, grouping features into named folders, and adding comments to features can make a big difference to the next person to look at the model.

CarrieIves

We settled on using the property MATERIAL in our model and we'll call that out on the drawing using $PRPSHEET:"MATERIAL".

CarrieIves

What does the STEP file look like with eDrawings? I use eDrawings to see what my STEP files look like and its faster to get a quick look at something.

CarrieIves

This is what I got at the top of the "watercooler" post

CarrieIves

Right now, we do have the materials database in PDM and it is at a status that engineers can check it out to write to. I don't know if anyone has tried adding materials to it since it moved into PDM. It was on a network drive until our PDM server moved to Azure and we couldn't to our network drives ...

CarrieIves

Frederick_Law We do have a Chinese speaker on staff and have a couple of other resources, including our notes having been translated and shown in a recent DFM document. Getting parts that are different between the samples and production is it's own special challenge. My concern around using the mod...

CarrieIves

@matt I have been getting errors such as

today. Is something going on?

CarrieIves

We are also planning to use the note "NO MATERIAL SUBSTITUTIONS ALLOWED" because we have had a major problem with a supplier (that we are going to steer away from in the future) picking a generic PC/ABS and trying to color it rather than buying the very specific grade with the color code i...

CarrieIves

We are considering how to call out the material on our drawing. We would like to set up a system that does as many things for us automatically as possible to reduce human error. We are using PDM standard and SolidWorks 2023 SP 4.0. It is possible that I am overanalyzing this. (But would I still be a...

CarrieIves

Thanks for the clarification Matt!

CarrieIves

I also appear to have this issue. I have a direct message that has been in my outbox since July 1. I guess that's why I didn't get any kind of reply.

CarrieIves

It varies on how we get the models. Sometimes we get SolidWorks models. Sometimes, we get surfaces to import. I usually remodel them so that I have something that is stable in CAD and adjusts in a way that we need.

CarrieIves

We have only been using PDM for a bit over a year here. We only have PDM Standard. We are a design services company, so our interactions with manufacturing products are not the same as many companies that make products. We do have a workflow so we can release drawings. We add an indented BOM to our ...

CarrieIves

Glenn shows you what the drawing views will default to. I believe if you place pre-defined views in your template you can set those for the display you want.

Our drawing templates have an iso view and 3 plan views already there.

CarrieIves

You can set a property in a model to drive the BOM quantity. I think you could set that to 0 in your dummy part. The quantity has to be a number. (I really want to put A/R for all my things like Loctite, but no such luck.)

CarrieIves

There isn't a good way to get a list of all the settings for a document or all the settings for a user. We are merging two divisions and I'm looking at our templates vs. theirs to see what is different. At least I have three monitors. An instance of SolidWorks with our template on the first, their t...

CarrieIves

I'd say that every project I work on has some kind of balance of what is most important. I would be careful about putting measurements on design outputs. I think it would be hard to measure things that actually mattered. Maybe you could measure the number of changes required to the design after it i...

CarrieIves

Our company is looking at Aras for PLM. It has a connector to SolidWorks. Anyone using it? Anything we should watch out for? Any using Aras for PLM? And anything we should watch out for with that?

Thanks,
Carrie

CarrieIves

@josh Your ColorTBl.sldtbt is exactly what we need. The characters all run together on my screen and in our PDF and look like a solid block.

Thank you.

CarrieIves

We use color to show where different surface finishes or textures are applied on injection molded parts. We have been creating a table, adding sketched boxes slightly inset, adding solid hatch, and changing the hatch color. The image below shows what this looks like on from one of our drawings. We p...

CarrieIves

Do the computers have different settings? Check the option Tools > Options > System Options > Messages/Errors/Warnings, "Treat missing mate references as errors". Turned on you get errors. Turning this option OFF does not display the errors when you open an assembly with mate errors with m...

CarrieIves

@JSculley - Thanks for sharing that it was a registry setting. I have noticed that sometimes those views are there and was wondering how they appeared. It must be a newer thing. I don't think I noticed it until we were using SW2023.

CarrieIves

Most of the SolidWorks macros you could find online to copy when I started were in VBA. You can also use this language to program Excel macros. I don't have very many macros because there aren't that many things that we have that are repetitive, but we do save PDFs and STEPs with revision informatio...

CarrieIves

Mostly we use display states. I have recommended that we try to use display states for our assembly steps rather than configurations.

Other than display states sometimes forgetting themselves, are there gotchas we should watch out for?

CarrieIves

We are using PDM standard, SolidWorks 2023, SP4.0 We have a top level assembly that has a bunch of configurations in it that represent different areas of the assembly. They kinda relate to assembly steps. If we do not have display data marks for the configurations, the file size of the SLDASM is abo...

CarrieIves

I'm currently reading 1634: The Bavarian Crisis, which is in the 1632 series started by Eric Flint, about a town in modern West Virginia that is transported to Germany in 1632, in the middle of the 30 Years War. The series should definitely be read in order, or if not in order, definitely read 1632...

CarrieIves

I read a lot of light "popcorn" type reads. I will read e-books on my phone, so they conveniently get carried around in my pocket, physical books, or listen to audiobooks. I heavily utilize my library for all the book formats and found there were other libraries I could get cards for to ge...

CarrieIves

I have done this in the past, but there is a manual update if filenames change. I assign a property called "Material" in my part that is set to the SolidWorks material. I then may put a property in my assembly called "Material". It gets set to "SW-Material@<partname>.SLDPRT&...

CarrieIves

TLDR - make sure copy tree gets all your files and that if you use Pack and Go with PDM, you save where you mean to. Something I have noticed on copy tree, it seems to default to only selecting the files in the same folder, so I have had to manually force it to select other files so that I get all t...

CarrieIves

We were lucky the clouds cleared enough for us to actually see the totality. We walked over to the large park near our house. The schools near us took the kids outside. I heard from a neighbor that was about two blocks from the elementary that she could hear all the kids yelling in excitement. I thi...

CarrieIves

@josh Is there a way to flip the sketch plane normal after a sketch exists?

CarrieIves

We had the opportunity to head a few hours south this weekend and enjoy the Texas Hill Country. It always surprises me how much a few hours drive can make in what season you are in. Our bluebonnets are just starting here in the Dallas area, but the ones down near Fredericksburg, TX are well are thei...

CarrieIves

If you have multiple configurations in PDM, make sure to add a display data mark to each configuration. If you don't when the part has to be at a new configuration than the one it was saved at (For example you change from the 12mm L bolt to the 16mm L bolt) PDM thinks the part was modified. If it is...

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