GabiJack.com

Archive for May 21st, 2008

As a female mechanical engineer, I always feel an overwhelming excitement whenever I find other women venturing in engineering, be it as professionals or students. I rejoice whenever I find women involved in science and technology, but particularly in engineering, since, in my country at least,  engineering is still a mainly male-dominated area, slowly opening up to women.  And women have so much to offer!

One of the things that I really like about this country is the encouragement that is being given to girls of all ages to pursue a career in science and technology.  I wish I had found that kind of support while I was a college student in Mexico!  Now that I’m a much older woman (a senile 34 year old), my college years way behind me, I often also wish that I could find a way to encourage other young women to become engineers, but right where I stand at the moment, in the middle of my own transition, there’s not really much that I can inspire or encourage others to. At least, that’s what I used to think, until recently, when I ran into this young lady at one of my son’s baseball games. I had noticed her once before. She was staring at me from the other side of the field, but it wasn’t until I put on my baseball cap that she came over to take a closer look. Yes, well, that particular day my husband and younger son had already taken the other baseball caps, and the only one left had the logo of the team my son was playing against, so I decided it was OK for me to look geeky in style and sport my SolidWorks baseball cap to the game. Anyway, she came over and asked me if I was Gabi, the blogger. Wow! Somebody reads this tripe! Well, it actually gets better than that, because she also told me that she’s a community college student, looking forward to transfer to a four year college to pursue a major in engineering. Then she said to me something that really made my day: she said that reading stories of engineer women like me and others has inspired her and, many times, kept her from giving up when times get tough.  Now, isn’t that something? To realize that this journey that I started for myself is actually helping others in their own journey is such an awesome thing… And it’s humbling too.

So, here it goes for this young lady, and for anyone else who might be interested. She asked me a question about Smart Fasteners and Hole Series (just my luck!). She wants to find a way to add  more than one smart fastener to a series of holes, to replace  a very long one that goes through several  parts in the assembly. After searching in the manual and online help and playing with it for a while to try to understand what she was talking about, I found that what she wants to do can actually be accomplished and is known as splitting a hole series. The tricky part is, however,  that you can’t really do this if the holes were created by an assembly feature. In other words, you can’t split the hole series if you used Hole Series command to create the series of holes. Does that make any sense? Each hole the Smart Fastener goes through has to be created by an individual feature, at the part level,for this to work.

So, imagine you have an assembly such as the one in the following image.

All the holes were created in the individual parts and then mated together in the assembly with concentric mates, so they would be aligned. If we use Smart Fasteners to apply some hardware to it, with this arrangement, we’ll get the following results. It doesn’t matter what hole we attempt to select, it will only allow us to select one.

If what we really wanted was to have a couple of short fasteners instead of a long one, we can split the hole series (break the fastener into two) as follows. First, if the Smart Fasteners property manager isn’t open already, open it by right clicking on the smart fastener icon in the feature manager and selecting Edit Feature from the menu. Once in the dialog box, expand Series 1, like in the image, to see all the hole features the Smart Fastener goes through.  Decide which hole features you want the new fastener to go through. In this case, we have four hole features and we want one fastener to go through the first two holes and the second one to go through the last two holes in the series. Drag the first hole feature for the new fastener (in this case, the third one in the series) and drop it on the fastener’s name at  the top level of the tree. By doing this, this hole feature and any other hole feature that comes after this one in the original series will now be part of a new series for the second Smart Fastener. The first two holes will remain in the original series. A message box will appear telling you that this operation will likely result in fasteners of different lengths. You have the option of choosing if you want to calculate new fastener lengths for both series or if you want to keep the original length for both of them.

Once the splitting operation is done, you now have two fasteners instead of one, each with its own hole series. If you don’t like the orientation of the fastener, you can always flip it, by right clicking on Series 1 and choosing Flip from the menu.

As a side note,  if the orientation of the parts in this assembly was slightly different, like in the following image, this whole procedure wouldn’t be necessary in order to have two fasteners instead of one. We could simply select two of the holes (see selection in the image) and two fasteners would be added.

So, there you have it. I hope it helped someone out there. And for all of you that may be reading this, if you have ever wished you could inspire others to pursue a career in engineering, mathematics, science and/or technology, please, consider becoming a mentor for women and others under-represented in these fields. Check out Mentor Net , if you wish, or simply go and take the time to share some of your knowledge and experience with others. You never know who you may inspire just by being yourself!