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Solidworks Best Practices

Sketches

  • Pre-modelling sketching! (That means pencil and paper, or ipad drawings!)

    • Don’t need full dimensions, just a pictoral representation of your concept

  • Take advantage of Sketch + Part Symmetry

  • Fully defined sketches - all lines must be black in your sketch when it’s done. The exceptions to this are splines, and the endpoints of construction lines. Generally good to at least constrain construction lines vertically and horizontally, even if their length isn’t defined

  • Be careful about Auto-relations - can hold ctrl while drawing to prevent them from occuring

    • Auto-relations highlight the entity orange, and the relation will appear in yellow before you click

  • Never use “Fully Define Sketch” - causes Solidworks to just guess what dimensions are important for your design, irrespective of your design intent

    • In a similar vein, never use the Fix relation - this just locks things in place

  • Don’t use a dimension where a constraint/relation would work

  • Selection boxes - if you start in top left, you get a blue box which only selects entities that are entirely within the box. If you start from the bottom right, you get a green box which selects every entity the box touches.

  • Symmetry Vs. Midpoint - symmetry is always preferable to midpoint

    • To implement a symmetry relation, click two entities and an entity to mirror over, and add the symmetry constraint

  • Sketch labels in feature tree

    • An Underdefined sketch has a (minus) next to the sketch name in the feature tree - this should never be there unless you’re using splines

    • Overdefined/unsolvable sketches - text in tree is yellow

    • Sketch with helping hand symbol - shared sketch, should probably avoid unless you have a good reason

    • Contour based (symbol is a polygonal shape with a hole in it) - should also have a really good reason to use this

  • General rules for Sketches

    • 1 feature per sketch

      • Do not cross-reference sketches unless absolutely necessary

    • Always use closed loops (unless doing a thin feature)

    • Do not use fillets, chamfers, or patterns at the sketch level - only at feature level

  • Convert entities

    • Project pre-existing sketches or entities into the active sketch

    • Generally stick to sketches and avoid converting entities on faces for stability

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