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Archive for August 12th, 2008

So many things that can be customized in SolidWorks 2009! This one in particular caught my eye, mainly because I’m still learning about drawing and detailing using SolidWorks. More in particular, I’ve spent the last few days learning about the different weld symbols available in SolidWorks and how to position them correctly in a drawing document. I’ll tell you more about that in a future post. For now, if you want to learn about what’s new for weldments in 2009, visit Ricky Jordan’s blog. He’s got some great posts and cool videos there.

Now back to the subject of this post. According to the “What’s new?”document, SolidWorks 2009 allows the user to create customized drafting standards in order to define their preferred specifications for annotations, dimensions and tables in a drawing document. This set of detailing properties included in the customized drafting standard can then be saved in a file and used in multiple drawings. It could be shared, for instance, among members of a team, to eliminate the guessing work and achieve uniformity.

Creating a customized drafting standard is really easy. First you need to do go to Options, Document Properties, Drafting Standard. On the right side, you will see a list of all available pre-defined standards. Select one from the list as the overall drafting standard.

Notice that at this point, you can’t specify a name for your customized standard or rename any of the fixed ones.  Select any of the detailing properties defined by the overall standard and modify according to your needs.  Notice on the top of the property manager, how as soon as you modify any of the detailing properties, the name of the overall drafting standard changes to reflect that you have modified it, and to avoid overwriting it. In this image, I changed the display type of the datum feature to Round (GB), which is different to what was specified by the ANSI overall drafting standard I had chosen in the beginning.

If you now go back to Drafting Standard, you’ll notice that you are allowed to rename the overall drafting standard and save it to an external file.

Later on, as needed, you can load that drafting standard to use it in another drawing.

I think this functionality has a lot of potential. What do you think? What would you use it for?