As a non-standard design engineer, I often use solidworks, a super drawing software, and my lazy skills are carried out on the software. After many years of work experience in the world’s top 500, the design of hundreds of equipment, and the design of tens of thousands of drawings, I have summed up seven practical skills of solidworks design and drawing.
1. Hide/show components
Many people usually hide the parts by placing the mouse arrow on the part, right-clicking the mouse, and clicking the icon of the glasses to hide the parts. In fact, the easier method is to press the Tab key after selecting the part with the mouse arrow, and the part disappears immediately.
If you want to display the hidden parts, the usual method is more troublesome. You must find the name of the part on the left design tree and click on the glasses. In many cases, it takes a lot of time to find the name of this part. The easy way is to place the mouse arrow on the hidden part, press Shift+Tab, and the part will appear immediately.
2. The transparent file cannot be selected
When designing, some parts are often made transparent, and sometimes the transparent parts need to be feature operations, and the parts need to be solidified, but it is difficult to select the already transparent parts, what should I do? The easy way is to place the mouse arrow on the position of the transparent part, press the Shift key, and the transparent part will be selected immediately.
3. Shortcut key settings
When the workload is large or the task is urgent, the efficiency will be greatly reduced by just relying on a few shortcut keys that are not shortcut keys that come with solidworks. We need to set our own shortcut keys according to our own habits. The method is, Options – Customize – Keyboard, find common commands in the keyboard page, and set shortcut keys. For example: stretch-A, cut-R, fit-Q, punch-H, etc.
4. Move command remember to change size
Everyone knows that as a design engineer, it is impossible to design all the dimensions in the mind and then reflect them on solidworks, often changing them again and again. For example, the stretched size needs to be reduced by 15mm. The usual practice is to reduce the original size by 15mm. If the size needs to be changed back to the original size later, most people may not remember the previously changed size. What should I do? The easy way is to use the “Move Face” command, you can stretch and cut, and the changed size can be remembered.
5. The sketch is not closed
When the sketch is not closed, other commands such as extruding and cutting cannot be performed. A simple sketch can find the disconnected point under the prompt of the software. What if the sketch is too complex and I want to find the position that doesn’t close? The easy way is to go to Tools-Sketch Tool-Check the legality of the sketch, the broken part will be displayed in the form of a magnifying glass, and you can directly modify it in it.
6. Drag the engineering drawing
Many people need to drag the view to a reasonable position when dimensioning or adjusting the position of the view. The usual method is to find the edge of the view and wait for the mouse arrow to display the move command before moving the view. The easy way is to hold down the Alt key and click on any point in the view to drag the view at will.
7. Cylindrical surface matching
If many cylindrical surfaces need to be matched, is it very cumbersome and time-consuming to use the fit commands repeatedly? The easy way is to select the cylindrical surface fit for the assembly, and the Alt key can be used for quick fit. Hold down Alt and drag the arc surface at one end of a shaft part, drag it to the arc of another hole part, and the two cylindrical surfaces will automatically have a concentric mark.
