Jeff's Tool Shed

First, I should ask if you’ve heard of Mechanical Mashup. No? It’s another one of Ben Eadie’s ideas, he of SolidMentor and SolidJott fame. Mechanical Mashup is for the DIY’ers out there. From their ‘About’ page:

This site is for you if….

-If you own something that you can’t wait for it to break so you can open it up to see how it works.
-If you see something like a studio light for $500.00 and know immediately how to make it for under $50.00
-If you would rather spend 5 hours making something you can buy for $10; just for the experience.
-If every time your friends see you they ask “what crazy thing are you making now?”.
-If everyone else sees a pile of garbage and you see a motor, some scrap material and the perfect stuff for something else you just haven’t thought of yet.
-If your garage only sees a car when you are doing work on it
-If you could get away with not handing out candy at Halloween and people would still come to see your place.

You should check it out. Not only is the stuff they do pretty cool, but they’re running a contest with the winner getting a 3D Print of something they, the winner, designed. If you have an idea, but no way to design it, Ben will cough up 8 hours of his time (and with the Canadian dollar being fairly strong, that’s a good deal). Details for the contest are here. You’ll have to listen to Ben’s Canadian accent, sans subtitles, but you should be ok.

I’ve been busy lately, super busy. I figure I’m averaging almost 60 hours per week here at my new job. Why you might ask? Because of the crap I’ve been trying to polish.

I was brought in to replace a couple of engineers who just weren’t getting things done and, it turns out, what they were getting done wasn’t done right. I think the thing that bothers me most is that they were both AE’s in the past. (I shudder when I think of the damage they might have caused.) I’ve seen under-defined sketches, boss-extrudes to fill cut-extrudes, parts with features that have been suppressed for no apparent reason. This is stuff that was going to be sent out for quote or manufacture/machining. The drawings that had been created were no better. In looking at them, I seriously doubt either engineer had much experience, if any, with manufacturing or production. Don’t even get me started on the part naming and numbering convention…what a cluster that is.

Anyone who has been using SolidWorks for any length of time knows that there are half a dozen different ways to get from A to B. Often you’ll hear there’s no “wrong way” to do it. I’m here to tell you that there is, in fact, a wrong way to do it. Sorry, but it’s the truth. While it’s one thing to haphazardly model parts up during an R&D phase, you need to start thinking about machining, manufacturing, assembly, etc at some point during the design phase. If you don’t, you end up with the crap that I inherited.

• Sometimes you need to take that super cool part and recreate it so that it doesn’t contain a slew of unnecessary features.
• Sometimes you need to redo the end condition on those holes as “up to next” so that your hole callout doesn’t say a depth of 6.375″ when the part is only 2″ thick.
• Sometimes, while you’re fixing that end condition, you need to add the other half of the holes (instead of mirroring) so that your hole callout recognizes that there are actually 12 holes and not only 6.
• Sometimes you need to not remove features that have been linked externally to other parts, or at least remember to delete the damn link so that a part doesn’t open with a bunch of friggin’ x’s!
• Sometimes you need to remove your head from your a…

Listen, just because you think you’re the ultimate CAD jockey doesn’t mean that you are. Do you take the time to think about how that totally awesome part is going to be made? Have you thought about the machinist or mold-maker? If you don’t do your own drawings, have you made your design intent clear enough that your drafter is going to get it? Hell, do you get it?

I realize that what I came across here may only happen once in a while, but even that’s too much. How much forethought would it take to design parts, even in the R&D phase, that, in the end, will work for everyone downstream that needs them? Yes, I realize that parts are extremely fluid during the R&D phase but they do start to solidify.

Something else to consider: when naming parts try to not be a complete tool about it. Naming a part “Intake Bushing, Rev A – Final – Final – Final” does nothing for my confidence that the part is actually the final one. Worse yet is having said part in two different folders where the older one reports to the assembly and not the newer one (based on last saved status). It’s enough to drive a grown man to cry.

What this all boils down to is this: Put some thought into the big picture rather than focusing only on your little part of it. It’ll make for happy people all around.

If you watch College football, you’ve seen their products. If you’re a Chargers fan, you’ve seen their products. Bengals or Packers? Yup, you too. DJO, Inc. designs and produces state-of-the-art knee braces, among other things. 90% of NCAA Division I teams use them. Shawn Merriman, Mark Tauscher, Chad Clifton and Carson Palmer use them. What’s my point here you ask? DJO uses SolidWorks to design their products. Actually, they do more than just design with SolidWorks, they do all their surfacing, rendering and analysis with SolidWorks too. They create a wide array of braces, some of which I’ve used. That’s even more to the point for me. I love finding out that something I’m using, or have used, was created in SolidWorks.

Do you know about the Dynamic Mirror tool in SolidWorks? No? Well, stick around and I’ll show you.

The Dynamic Mirror tool is a sketch tool that allows you to dynamically mirror (duh) as you’re sketching. To use it, you first have to find it as it’s won’t be on your sketch toolbar, or ‘S’ key menu, by default. Hit your ‘S’ key, RMB on the menu and select customize. Go to the ‘Commands’ tab and select ‘Sketch’. There you’ll see the Dynamic Mirror icon:

Just drag and drop it to either the ‘S’ menu or to the sketch toolbar.

Now that you’ve got the button, let’s talk about using it. It’s quite simple, actually. Just like the regular ‘Mirror Entities’ command, you’ll need a centerline. It can either be a sketch, or an existing edge. Simply highlight it and click on the ‘Dynamic Mirror’ button. Start sketching and with each click of your mouse you’ll see a mirrored entity of what you just sketched. While you can, in fact, sketch on both sides of your centerline, you’ll want to stick to one side or the other to prevent overlapping geometry. Once you’ve finished with whatever you wanted to mirror, you can turn off the dynamics but clicking on the button again.

Dynamic Mirror is a great way to quickly, and easily, create symmetric sketches.

I’m constantly amazed at the stuff that’s designed in SolidWorks, or 3D-CAD in general. The layers of complexity, the swoopy surfaces, the level of detail; it all amazes and awes me. Then there’s the “everyday” stuff that it never even crossed my mind that it was designed, period.

How about this, from Crayola:

Yup, your kids’ markers may have been designed by 3D mechanical design software.

Then there’s this offering from Hamilton-Beach:

For you hunters out there, Federal Cartridge is in on it, too:

See those lights in the Nashville Symphony Concert Hall? Yup, SolidWorks:

What’s my point to all this? It’s two-fold, actually. One, the next time you look at something maybe you’ll wonder a bit about who/what/how when it comes to designs of every day items. The second point, and this is directed more towards the beginners, is take those everyday items and reverse engineer them. It’s one of the best ways to learn SolidWorks.

Warning: this is going to be another of my opinionated posts. I welcome any, and all, well thought out comments. However, should you make things personal, I’ll be forced to call for the immediate removal of all your body hair so that you end up looking like this (yes, it’s safe for work). You have been warned.

A couple of months ago I was training some engineers on SolidWorks. Their company had been using SolidWorks for a bit and a couple of them had brought their laptops to the session. After going through one lesson, and having them start the examples, I was walking around and saw a screen similar to this:

I say similar because I’m pretty sure he had every possible toolbar turned on and I got tired going that far. I stood behind him for a moment, slack-jawed. Bear in mind, this was on a laptop with a 17″ screen. I’m not sure how he was ever able to design anything in the 6 square inches of usable graphics area , but I digress. So I asked him why he still had his setup looking like something from 2006. He gave me that look. You know, the look that says “why are you such an ass?”. Anyway, he went on to explain that it’s what he was comfortable with, that he didn’t have to search the command manager, he knew where everything was, yada-yada-yada. That was when I noticed that he didn’t have the command manager turned on either. I’m thankful that I didn’t hit anything when I fell over…

I took a deep breath and asked him about the ‘S’ key. He asked, a bit arrogantly, what I meant (thankfully, I was sitting down at this point). I then went on to explain to him the wonder that is the ‘S’ key and how it was customizable. How it was there only when you needed it. How, in his case, it could provide ten times the available graphic area, which garnered me “that look”, again. How his mouse travel would be greatly lessened. How all the cool kids were doing it. How, had the technology been around, there’d be 11 commandments instead of 10.

What it all boiled down to was this: it was outside his ‘comfort’ area. Now I don’t want to go and start belittling people who are uncomfortable with change. I’ve been there, I get it. However, there are times when not changing really isn’t the best course of action. I believe this is one of those times.

I know there are those of you out there who have a macro mapped to every single key. That’s awesome. Honestly, I’m jealous of you; I don’t have the brain capacity to remember what macro was mapped where. The ‘S’ key, though, I can handle. With one keystroke I have 95% of the tools I need at that particular moment. That, in my not so humble opinion, rocks! As I explained to him how versatile the ‘S’ key was, I could see that his mind was beginning to engage, that he was beginning to see the possibilities. That totally made it all worth it for me. I love teaching SolidWorks, especially when I see the light come on.

Here’s the thing, I know that there are still a number of people out there who still have toolbars active. There are those who don’t use the Command Manager much less the ‘S’ key. I want to know why. I want to understand what it is about toolbars that makes you stay with them.

When it comes time to deciding whether you’re going to attend your upcoming SWUG meeting, what topic(s) would compel you to go? I know that everybody loves Tips & Tricks presentations, but how many can you actually see before they become mundane? SolidWorks employee speakers? Much easier to get for the east coast groups than anywhere. That doesn’t stop me from trying to get them, though. How about local users presenting on what they’re creating with SolidWorks? Is this something that interests you?

What would your ultimate SWUG meeting involve, outside of pizza and soda?

How does one go about reviewing a book, without bias, when said book was written by friends? Well, if you’re me, you just do it. I’ve never had a problem separating business and pleasure and, in this case, this is all business.

Alex Ruiz, with help from Gabi Jack, has written a SolidWorks book for beginners. SolidWorks 2010: No Experience Required is, truly, written for the beginner. It starts you off by going through system requirements, then into how to start the program once installed, to the UI. They go through the UI in great detail which, I suspect, is highly beneficial to new users. Alex does a good job of explaining what the toolbars do, what the Feature Manager is for, and what shortcuts are available out of the box. (Though I didn’t see any mention of ctrl+1 (front), ctrl+2 (back), etc.)

With step-by-step instructions, the book walks the reader through each phase of part/assembly/drawing creation and, in the end, the user will have created a desk lamp. With tips and tricks throughout, the user will not only learn the basics, but can glean info that will help speed up their design processes.

SolidWorks 2010: No Experience Required is a highly detailed manual, and would seem to be perfect for the beginner. I think adding a section on repairing/understanding errors would be highly beneficial, though. Being able to handle errors early on makes life so much easier for the newbie, if you ask me.

I also disagree with showing Instant3D. Frankly, I think it can cause the new user more problems than not. It doesn’t take much for someone to inadvertently drag a face and not fully realize what they’ve done. Instant3D, in my opinion, should be shown at an intermediate level or, at least, have some sort of disclaimer in bold about the possibility of hosing things up quite easily if you’re not paying attention.

Overall, I think the book is laid out well. It’s written clearly and concisely, if not a bit too simplified. I can see this book being extremely helpful to students especially. I give it a solid B.

I know, this subject has probably been discussed adnaseum but I don’t care. This is my blog and I write what I want. Today I want to write about why I hate external references. Specifically, why I hate it when someone creates an entire assembly that is so intertwined with external references that it’s next to impossible to change anything without blowing up everything else. Hold on, I need to take a deep breath here.

I took on a side job where I’m managing an assembly for a small company. 99.99% of the time this wouldn’t be a big deal, right? This particular assembly has a skeleton sketch, though. Again, not normally a big deal as skeleton sketches often only control the assembly and the placement of parts/sub-assemblies. Uh-uh, not this one. This sketch not only controls part placement but part geometry as well. I can’t even begin to describe how frustrating it is to try to fix a sketch only to see that, while it is fully defined, it doesn’t have a single dimension on it *and* it’s miles away from the origin. Perhaps this wouldn’t really matter in the big scheme of things, but every single external reference is broken. All of them. There’s only 54 unique parts in this assembly, but when every sketch entity is defined by at least one external reference…I’ll let you do the math on it, my head is starting to hurt just thinking about it. Again.

Look, I totally understand the need to occasionally create parts in context. I do, I’ve done it. However, I don’t leave those relationships after the part is created. Sure, it’s nice when hole A drives the size of hole B, but just at what point does enough become enough? Seriously, everything is driven by the assembly sketch. Can you imagine the carnage that would ensue should someone accidentally modify that sketch? The collateral damage (keyboards, mice, monitors) alone would be staggering.

The assembly I’m talking about, in the end, has 666 parts (a bad sign to begin with?) with only two sub-assemblies and it takes forever to open. Aside from the fasteners, and their patterns, almost every part has an “in-place” mate. This I find especially annoying as it goes against how I believe an assembly is created, and you all know that I am always correct. I’ll pause here for laughter. I’m sure that the originator of this assembly had only the best intentions when they created the original file; then again, so did Dr. Frankenstein. However, in creating such a monster, the mad scientist neglected to leave any information regarding the proper care and feeding for said monster. This, my friend, just exacerbates the situation. If you’re going to leave such an abomination for future generations, at least have the common decency to provide some notes regarding your thought process so that we, the unfortunate heirs, can have a chance at understanding what’s going on. It makes me thankful that I don’t drink to drown my sorrow, otherwise I’d probably have drunk myself to death.

I think though, the worst part of it all is that the overall assembly is so incestuous, that I can’t move the part sketches to their corresponding origins without wreaking all sorts of other havoc. I’m hopeful that once I’ve gone through everything and removed all the in-context bs that I’ll be able to have more control over the assembly. I’m not overly optimistic, though. It wouldn’t surprise me if the mad scientist has some other diabolically created mates or relations that will continue to aggravate me.

Thank you, dear reader, for allowing me to rant. I’m not 100% sure how much sense this post will make, but I certainly feel better at this very moment.

By a show of hands, how many of you have tried SimulationXpress, or any of the ‘Xpress’ products available in SolidWorks? Sure, they’re meant to be like gateway drugs, tempting and teasing you into purchasing the full-blown product, but that doesn’t mean that they’re bad for you.

SimulationXpress is a decent, first-pass, analysis tool. It’ll let you know if your part is in the ballpark, though I wouldn’t base my final design off of it. You can find it on the ‘Evaluate’ tab of your Command Manager, or under the ‘Tools’ dropdown. It’s a simple tool to use just by following the prompts. The wizard walks you through the necessary steps to run an analysis of a part so that you can have an idea of how it’s going to react.  It is limited to force/pressure analysis but, again, you’re just going for a ballpark idea here.

Where SimulationXpress, and its fellow Xpress tools, are already in every seat of SolidWorks, don’t you think you owe it to yourself to try them out? As I’m so fond of saying, if I can do it, anyone can do it.