Book Image

Learn SOLIDWORKS - Second Edition

By : Tayseer Almattar
Book Image

Learn SOLIDWORKS - Second Edition

By: Tayseer Almattar

Overview of this book

SOLIDWORKS is the leading choice for 3D engineering and product design applications across industries such as aviation, automobile, and consumer product design. This book helps you to get up and running with SOLIDWORKS and understand each new concept and tool with the help of easy-to-follow exercises. You'll begin with the basics, exploring the software interface and finding out how to work with drawing files. The book then guides you through topics such as sketching, building complex 3D models, generating dynamic and static assemblies, and generating 2D engineering drawings to prepare you to take on any design project. You'll also work with practical exercises to get hands-on experience with creating sketches, 3D part models, assemblies, and drawings. To reinforce your understanding of SOLIDWORKS, the book is supplemented by downloadable files that will help you to understand the concepts and exercises more easily. Finally, you'll also work on projects for 3D modeling objects inspired by everyday life. By the end of this SOLIDWORKS book, you'll have gained the skills you need to create professional 3D mechanical models using SOLIDWORKS and be able to prepare effectively for the Certified SOLIDWORKS Associate (CSWA) and Certified SOLIDWORKS Professional (CSWP) exams.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Section 1 – Getting Started
4
Section 2 – 2D Sketching
7
Section 3 – Basic Mechanical Core Features – Associate Level
10
Section 4 – Basic Evaluations and Assemblies – Associate Level
13
Section 5 – 2D Engineering Drawings Foundation
18
Section 6 – Advanced Mechanical Core Features – Professional Level
21
Section 7 – Advanced Assemblies – Professional Level

Understanding and utilizing configurations

Oftentimes, when creating a product, we will create multiple versions of it, with each of the versions having a slight variation from the others. SOLIDWORKS provides special tools for such configurations. In this part, we will learn all about configurations and how to use them to create different variations of a certain product or object.

What are configurations?

Configurations are different variations of a particular product or object. These variations would have small differences when compared to each other. For example, the four drawings in the following figure show different configurations of the same object:

Figure 13.14 – Different configurations of the same object

Note that the four configurations do not have major differences from each other. Because of this similarity, it is an advantage for us to be able to create all of the different configurations in one SOLIDWORKS file rather than having a...