While chatting on Twitter a few days ago, a couple of SW users and yours truly got a bit confused about changing the display settings of annotations in a drawing document.  The misunderstanding began when one of our fellow users asked something more or less like this:  “In Document Properties, Detailing, Annotations Display, it won’t let me change the Text scale of the annotation. Wh...

Learning how to properly do drawing and detailing in SolidWorks isn’t precisely the most exciting thing in the world, but it’s necessary, so I try to keep at it, even when it seems I’m making progress in an extremely slow fashion. Anyway, I was learning how to create Annotation Favorites, when I noticed that something was different about Favorites for SW2007 and SW2008, when compared to SW20...

Well, not precisely… This is just a quick tip on how to edit a cropped drawing view. As you probably already know, whenever you create a cropped view in SolidWorks, the two things you need are a model view and a closed sketch that will define the area of the view that you wish to keep. Everything outside the sketch will be eliminated. But what happens if you make a mistake while creating the ske...

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 pos...

Learning how to use the different tools for drawing and detailing in SolidWorks is not precisely the most fun I’ve had with the software so far. I’d much rather work with the solid model!   Maybe that’s why I had been putting it up for later, and why I get sidetracked so often.  Anyway, after beating myself up for not being more diligent, I’ve spent most of this week studying and practi...

Revolved sections (also known as rotated sections) are really useful for adding clarity to drawings of parts with features that have a constant shape throughout the length which can’t be easily shown in an external view.  By using revolved sections, the shape of the cross section of a bar, rod, arm, spoke or other can be shown  in the longitudinal view of the object, instead, as a section that...

I know this little piece of information is extremely basic for those with lots more experience in SolidWorks, but believe me, I just found out about this one while working my way through the SolidWorks Drawings training manual. Well, you know there are multiple views you can choose from to display your part or assembly, right?  You have top, bottom, right, left, isometric, trimetric, etc.  Did y...

Back in February, when I made my first attempt at creating multiple configurations for a part, some people warned me, with their own good reasons, that configurations are not really all that great, since they usually cause more trouble than they do help. Among those problems created by configurations, there was the one about not being able to tell what configuration had been used when creating a d...