So, after a short break I headed over to the meeting room Toucan 1 for the Weldments focus group meeting, hosted by Jay Patterson, SolidWorks Product Specialist for DS SolidWorks. Once again, this was an extremely small group, but luckily graced with the presence of Randy Ooms, from Granco Clark, who really knows what he’s talking about when it comes to SolidWorks and Weldments. Randy is also one of this year’s speakers; together with Nicholas Benner, he’ll be presenting about SolidWorks Network Implementation on Wednesday at 1:30 pm.

I must confess that I was feeling a bit out of place, because the guys that were there have not only been using SolidWorks for quite a few years, but are also very well entrenched in the industry. However, I’m grateful that they allowed me to be there and learn from them.

First thing that surprised me was to hear how some of the functionality provided by SolidWorks sometimes goes unused, because it really doesn’t cater to their needs. The weldment bead feature is an example of this. Most of them don’t really use it, unless it’s absolutely necessary, like in case it needs to be included in an analysis of the model. The limitations of the bead feature were also discussed, as well as ideas to improve it and make it actually useful.  Weldment profiles are another good example of this. In fact, Randy mentioned that in his company they have practically thrown away the profiles supplied by SolidWorks  for aluminum and steel structural members and substituted them with their own, simplified, custom profiles, because this way it’s easier for them to obtain the information they need  (and nothing else they don’t need) about the size of the profile by looking at the name of the sketch, while in the profiles provided by SolidWorks all sketches are called sketch1 by default and don’t provide much information at a glance. On this same topic, it was also mentioned the need for a way to obtain information on those weldment profiles that may not be accessible to the user, perhaps in the shape of a flyover little window that provides that info, even if we can’t really open the profile to examine it.

The desire for enhancements for gussets and end caps was also addressed, more in particular, the need for automatic properties to be generated, so the user doesn’t have to go and apply dimensions to them manually in order to make them parametric, and, in the case of end caps, it was also discussed whether it’s useful or even desirable by some users to allow the length of a tube to be shortened when applying an end cap, like it’s currently done in SolidWorks 2009.

One of the attendees spent quite some time explaining about the trouble he’s got when modeling something as a huge multibodies weldments part that he then would need to break down into several parts, each with their own BOM and detailing. That’s when Jay mentioned how weldments in the past used to be more assembly oriented, as opposed as the way it is nowadays, and posed the question to the group on whether it would be useful or not to somehow orient it to be more about assemblies again, instead of multibodies parts. Personally, I have no idea how this weldments functionality used to be in the past and the multibody approach is all I’ve known, so I can’t tell if this would be a good idea or not. 

As an added bonus, we learned a bit about using library features to flatten the ends of a tube. It was a good meeting, but it would’ve been even better if more people had shown up. After all, that’s the purpose of these meetings, to get the feedback from the users of the product, and hopefully, a few ideas for enhancements and new functionality that is really needed.