While at SolidWorks World this year I attended three sessions that were somehow different to what I had expected when I signed up for them.  The subject and purpose for each of them differed from one another, but what they all had in common was that they all required from the attendee to not only interact or follow through a tutorial, like in the hands-on sessions, but to actually provide the c...

I hope you are not growing tired of my SolidWorks World chronicles just yet, because I still have a lot more to write about. This was a particularly good SolidWorks World for me and I want to share what I learned with you.  This time, let me tell you about yet another hands-on session I attended. This one was presented by Michael LaFleche, Regional Technical Manager for CAPINC, and it was an int...

Hi everyone! I hope you had a really nice weekend! It was a four day weekend for us here and it sure felt good to get a break, plus a little Valentine’s Day candy. Now it’s back to the routine… and the diet.  Anyway… I shall now resume my chronicles of SolidWorks World 2010. As I mentioned before, this year I was really fortunate to be able to pre-register for hands-on s...

After an incredibly long flight… Oh, wait; it only took about an hour to get to Anaheim from San Jose.Err, never mind… The important thing is that I’m here in Anaheim right now, already registered and ready for SolidWorks 2010. Today is a slow day for me. Unlike some of my bloggers friends, I haven’t got any meetings or special sessions going on, so I’m killing some t...

This is probably old news for those of you that keep up with the forums and the rest of the blogs, but there are others that may be reading this information for the first time (I just found out myself).  An important and potentially destructive issue has been identified that affects SolidWorks users running PhotoWorks in 64 bit systems with SolidWorks 2009 SP 5, SolidWorks 2010 SP 1 or SolidWorks...

Just a few minutes ago, I followed a link to an interesting survey about SolidWorks packaging and pricing. I’m not sure how long this survey has been going on, to be honest, so I apologize if you have already seen it or heard about it before, but it was news for me. I had included a link to it, but they told me that was my personal link and I’ve already taken the survey. You can access thi...

This blog post was inspired by a question I received via email. The question was about how to create a section view in an assembly.  There was a picture attached to the email that showed an assembly  that seemed to have been cut along two planes, but only partially, and  it appeared that one chunk  of the assembly had been removed to reveal the inside, while the rest of the assembly remained v...

A few days ago, my friend Chris Thompson, founder and owner of Appian Way Technologies, took a look at my model of the safety latch and suggested the following changes in order to improve the simulation study. First of all, he added small fillets to the areas of the latch where stress concentrations are expected, at the “root” of the latch. He also “cut” the model in half, in order to take...

Most of you have no idea and perhaps don’t even care about the fact that I adopted a little kitten about a month ago. What can I say? If you are a smart person, unlike moi, you’ll avoid visiting the pet store while the local cat rescue is showing off their adoptable cats. But I admit I would’ve probably ended up adopting the kitten anyway, eventually… I named him Troubles because it suits ...

I must confess that the arms were quite a challenge for me.  My result is not perfect, I know, but I think it’s close enough.  Not so bad for a beginner, at least? Anyway, I had tried doing a surface sweep, but it didn’t look good, so I went with more lofts.  I started by creating some more geometry (What a surprise!).  I sketched a spline on the Top plane, following the silhouette of the ...

When you’re on the road with a dog, one thing you learn pretty quickly is that your choices for food are limited because most places won’t allow dogs inside, not even little lap dogs.  I think we must’ve visited every single fast food place along I-70 on the way to Ohio and every single one along I-80 on the way back. Too much junk food!  Master Andrew seemed pleased, however, since he man...

Just as I promised, I got one of the videos about Animation ready. This one is about the easiest part: using the Animation Wizard to create animations of exploded/collapsed assemblies and rotations. I apologize if the video is not the best, more in particular the audio of the video (I kind of don’t like my voice), but I still hope someone out there finds it useful.  Enjoy!     ...

On a terribly off-topic note, today was the first day of school on this side of California. My little one is finally a kindergartener, which leaves some free time for me to go back to school and take at least one or two classes this fall.  So, I didn’t win the lotto, haven’t got that super-duper job I’ve been wishing for, and even some project I was very excited about ended up being a bit o...

While at Concord we were treated to a hands-on session where we got to try out some of the new functionality that will be available in this new release.  Most of us had already been exploring it through the Beta testing program, but this was our chance to ask questions about it and satisfy our curiosity.  This is a big release and it was impossible to cover everything in so very little time, so ...

I was actually planning on posting about friction coefficients and the way it all works using an example of a simulation of these tong grabs, but before I do that, I thought I should share with you about a little problem I ran into while trying to use a special option available for the hinge mate and a way to work around it. OK, first of all, let me tell you a bit about what these tong grabs do....