Hello Bloggers, Rod Harper here again. A little late on the question of the week from last week but I'll post a double here today.
The last two weeks consisted of Advanced Part and my newly created class CAD200 SolidWorks Administrator. I'm pretty excited about this new class but we'll get to that in a moment.
Advanced Part:
Great question right at the end of class. The question was
"If I have modeled many many features into a part and realize I need it in a different set of units (i.e. in to mm), what do I do?"
Maybe the guy who gave you the original napkin sketch wrote down numbers and didn't put any units with it. This definitely could happen in the real world working globally with English and metric units, sometimes interchangeably. So let's set up an example. Current units are set to metric and we need to get to English. There are two ways to go about changing this.
1. Change your units in the document properties to English. What used to be 100mm now becomes a conversion to English at 3.937 in. But what if we were looking for 100 inches? Temporarily leave the units in metric. Click on all the dimensions and manually convert the "mm" to "in". Another way to accomplish this would be to write a short program to run through all the dimensions and update. We'll talk more about Macros/API in another post.
2. If there are WAY too many sketches and features to go back through and update as explained above, you can use the scale command. Insert > Features > Scale will allow you to scale by 25.4 to convert your model to the correct size. Keep in mind that if you make any changes above the scale command in the tree, you will need to be thinking back to metric. This option would be the quickest fix.
SolidWorks Administrator - New course offering!
I've been working on this manual since the end of last year and finally had the first class this past week. I feel it went well and I received no major complaints regarding the course content. This course talks a lot about tools that aren't covered in any of the other classes. One important chapter covers installations of all types and steps you through step/picture by step/picture. Lots of great information to have on hand as a SW admin.
A couple questions came up worth highlighting here.
"Does the Copy Settings Wizard work across versions?"
No it does not. It's meant to help you distribute custom settings across other computers using the same version of SW.
"When do I use the Property Tab Builder versus Custom Properties?"
When the amount of templates files created to fulfill the companies needs becomes excessive, it's time to use the Property Tab Builder. Property Tab Builder allows you to create a task pane that can access any tab you create to fill in a specific set of custom properties in your file. Remember, this does does not change document settings so you will still need to set up your template files to an extent.
That's it for now. Please post a comment on what you think of these tips. Have a great weekend!!!
Rod Harper
3DU Instructor
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