While it is difficult to simulate the actual compression of a spring in SolidWorks, you can create multiple configurations to represent the different compression states of a spring. This will allow you to quickly switch back and forth between different lengths of a spring, and with a design table, you can easily create as many… Read more »
Posts By: Rohit Mitra
Getting Twisted: Driving a Helix by a Path
The Helix/Spiral tool in SolidWorks is limited to creating straight helices and spirals, so to create a helix along a curved path, you have to get a little creative. The twist along path option, in swept features, allows you to forego the use of the Helix tool and use a combination of a swept surface… Read more »
Where are all the Weldment Profiles?
You’re new to Weldments in SolidWorks and excited to start using structural members, only to find that the default weldment profiles are limited to a sample of the ISO standard. Then you ask, where are all the weldment profiles? Presumably to save space, SolidWorks made all of the weldment standards downloadable from the design library… Read more »
Photoview 360: Creating a Transparent PNG
SolidWorks should have added an option to output an image with a transparent background, in Photoview 360. At least Photoview creates an alpha channel that can be saved out along with the colored image. This allows you, if you have Photoshop or a similarly equipped image editing program, to manually remove out the background. This… Read more »
Fun with Sketched Bends
It’s one thing to create a complex shape with SolidWorks Sheet Metal; It’s an entirely different thing to get that shape to flatten. The sketch bend tool allows you to create multiple bends in a single feature by adding multiple lines to your bend sketch. If you combine this with the unfold and fold features,… Read more »
SolidWorks Shortcuts:The Littler Green Check Mark
SolidWorks has quite a few shortcuts built in, a lot of which aren’t immediately apparent. In quite a few features, if you select an entity, you’ll see a mouse icon with an image for either the right or left click, something like a green check mark, arrow, or eye glasses indicating that if you right… Read more »