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simply asking what different buttons do, I hope that it will help you develop an intuition for thinking like the software. Jeff Ray, CEO of the SolidWorks Corporation, has said that the goal is to make the software as “intuitive as a light switch.” While most people will agree that they have some work left to achieve that particular goal, I believe that approaching the interface intuitively, rather than attempting to remember it all by rote, is the best method. Good luck to you.

Contacting the Author

If you want to contact me, to ask a question about the book's content or to make a suggestion for improving future editions, the best ways to do this are through e-mail (matt@dezignstuff.com) or my blog (http://dezignstuff.com/blog). On the blog, you can leave comments and read other things I have written about the SolidWorks software, CAD, and engineering or computer topics in general. If you want to contact me for commercial help with a modeling project, my e-mail address is the best place to start that type of conversation. I always look forward to hearing what real users think about the material.

Thank you very much for buying and reading this book. I hope the ideas and information within its pages help you accomplish your professional goals.

Part I: Introducing Assembly Basics

In This Part

Chapter 1

Understanding Assemblies

Chapter 2

Navigating the Assembly Interface

Chapter 3

Visualizing Assemblies

Chapter 1: Understanding Assemblies

In This Chapter

Why use assemblies

Creating assemblies

Positioning parts into assemblies

Working with external references

This chapter serves as an overview of some of the different tools and techniques that are available to SolidWorks users in assemblies. Most importantly, this chapter discusses the various purposes that you might have for creating assemblies. The second emphasis of this chapter is to help you understand various methods for using external references. More than anything, this chapter prepares you for important decisions that you will need to make relating to your modeling methods in SolidWorks found throughout this book.

If you take the SolidWorks training class from a SolidWorks reseller, all assemblies seem to take the same form and have the same function. You may then take this way of working back to your office and start applying it there. However, if you do this, you could be missing out on many other ways of using assemblies. While SolidWorks definitely seems to have a certain orthodoxy in mind for the assemblies functionality, there are actually an array of techniques that you can use to achieve a wide range of goals.

This chapter helps you identify some of the ways in which you can apply SolidWorks assemblies functionality to accommodate your goals and your workflow style. You are encouraged to experiment and evaluate some of these methods to find out what suits your needs best. You don't have to accept the established techniques. In fact, as you will see in this chapter, the established techniques tend to be less efficient, and especially less robust, than some alternative methods when you start making changes to your assemblies.

A lot of these alternative methods have been developed by many different users of other CAD packages over the years and have become universal to some extent. They have been adapted to SolidWorks use in different forms.

Understanding the Purpose of Assemblies

In the physical world, assemblies exist for several reasons:

• Separating materials

• Allowing relative motion

• Reducing material

• Allowing for different manufacturing techniques

• Allowing for disassembly or repair

In a CAD model, you need to follow these physical-world reasons for making individual parts and putting them together in assemblies, but CAD models can also have additional requirements. Independent of the reasons stemming from physical-world requirements, CAD assemblies might have some unique reasons for existing:

• Depicting an assembly process such as order of operations

• Specifying dimensional assembly