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FIGURE 14.10

Populating multiple holes at once in an assembly

Feature Driven component patterns

With Feature Driven component patterns (also known as derived patterns), a pattern of parts in an assembly is driven by a feature pattern in a part. You can find this assembly feature by choosing Insert⇒Component Patterns⇒Feature Driven in the assembly menus. You can find more information on Feature Driven component patterns in Chapter 15.

Exploring Smart Fasteners

Smart Fasteners are Toolbox parts that know what holes they go into automatically. The database that holds all the information for Toolbox part types and sizes also holds the information for the sizes of the holes. It is only natural that SolidWorks would try to combine this information and use it to its best advantage. You can use Smart Fasteners in two ways: by asking SolidWorks to automatically place fasteners in existing holes or placing Hole Series holes and fasteners simultaneously in the context of the assembly.

Using Smart Fasteners with Hole Series

One way to use Smart Fasteners is in conjunction with the Hole Wizard Hole Series. Hole Series creates the holes through multiple parts at once, producing the appropriate type of hole through each part, and then Smart Fasteners automatically place fasteners in the holes, even including nuts and washers. To do this, you can select the option on the last panel of the Hole Series PropertyManager interface, as shown in Figure 14.11. If you are planning to use Smart Fasteners, using them in conjunction with the Hole Series holes is your best bet.

FIGURE 14.11

The Place Fastener option

The Smart Fasteners with Hole Series is a function with which you should be careful. It is very effective, but it may cost you some performance (speed). The Hole Series is an assembly feature that drives several in-context features, and then parts are mated to those in-context features (fasteners).

Using Smart Fasteners Populate All

Smart Fasteners functionality has an even more automatic component. Once an assembly has parts mated into place, you can place fasteners into parts with appropriate holes by face, by part, or for the entire assembly at once.

Caution

You may not want to spend a lot of time trying to use this type of Smart Fasteners functionality. Finding documented success with Smart Fasteners is difficult. The topic is not often mentioned as a SolidWorks World, blog, or user group topic. Although in theory, it offers interesting functionality, in reality, it receives very little attention — definitely a warning sign. To get success with the tool, you have to use it in the way in which it was intended to be used. The highest-level functionality is not very flexible.

One assembly where Smart Fasteners work surprisingly well (in fact, almost perfectly) is with the sample files that install with SolidWorks. Upon closer examination, the reason this works well is because it uses assembly features for the holes, and so the holes do not appear in the individual parts. If that is the price that you have to pay just to get fasteners to populate automatically, then you may prefer to put them all in manually.

Understanding the limitations of Smart Fasteners

Smart Fasteners have some documented limitations where you should not expect them to work:

• Holes in single parts

• Holes created by extruding a nested loop

• A mirrored hole or cut features

• Holes in mirrored, imported, or derived parts

• Misaligned holes

• Holes with a large difference in diameter

• Holes with large gaps between them (a large gap in the axial direction)

• Holes made using different techniques (such as sketch pattern versus feature pattern)

If you would like to try out Smart Fasteners, then you can use the assembly included on the DVD called Smart Fasteners.sldasm. In this assembly, half of the holes are done correctly and the other half are not: the screws are put in either backward or headfirst. The documented method for flipping the fasteners is to expand the Smart Fastener, right-click the series, and choose