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Design Resources, Tips & Tricks »

[18 Aug 2009 | 17 Comments | ]
3 Ways To Model The Same Thing

If you haven’t noticed, people are different.  They have different tastes in clothing, food, and music.  You say tomato, I say ‘mater.
So it follows that designers will have different modeling methodologies.  Sometimes, even circumstances or desired design intent dictate how you model something.
Take for instance this simple part with an o-ring groove in it:

I had a new SolidWorks user approach me a while back with the question, “How do I create something like this?”
I responded by showing them several different methods to achieve the same result.
One approach would be to …

Tips & Tricks, Video »

[19 Jun 2009 | 3 Comments | ]

Last November, I posted a tip on how to more easily mate components using an Alt-Drag technique.  A reader had a question about it, so I thought I would create a video demonstrating it.  I hope it helps.  (Tip: switch to full screen or view in HD on Vimeo)
This is my first attempt at video in quite a while, and I was impressed with the results!  Sorry about the audio, but I don’t think it’s too bad.
Like it/hate it?  Let me know what you think in the comments!

Tips & Tricks »

[26 May 2009 | 13 Comments | ]
CADFanatic’s Tips & Tricks Tuesday – Derived Sketches

How do you recreate an identical sketch on another face/plane? Convert edges is fine if you want to project a sketch to a parallel face or plane, but what if the face in question is not parallel? You could copy a sketch and then mess around with linking all the dimensions, but what if you want the sketch in a different orientation? Enter the Derived Sketch command.
The Derived Sketch is a cool tool; it creates a copy of a sketch that is tied back to the original. After deriving a …