When we mechanical engineers create our designs, we rely heavily on our Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools, amazing and enormously complex masterpieces of modern software engineering and design.

It is up to the talents and experience of the design engineer to ensure that those parts are producible. The designs that are not easy to produce are quickly weeded out and rarely see the light of day.

1) Top Down vs Bottom Up:

• TOP DOWN: Building your 3D parts from a 2D sketch that is drawn in top, front, and side views
• BOTTOM UP: Building individual parts independently than bringing them together for final assembly

The main advantage to Top Down design is that it allows you to make minor adjustments quickly with minimal effort. By making a single change in a 2D sketch, you can immediately see how it will interact with your other parts as a system.

If you need to make a major change, the bottom up approach can be more useful. While top down is more efficient, bottom up design is more thorough by nature. So if you need a major change, bottom up designs lend themselves to less rebuilds or errors.

2) Always Designs are fully Dimensioned :

SOLIDWORKS is built to operate with defined measurements for every aspect of your design. If your designs are not fully dimensioned, they are prone to error especially while making adjustments to your designs.

While it may be tempting to move quickly while setting up your designs, it won’t translate to the final prototype well as you make adjustments

3)SOLIDWORKS Keyboard Shortcuts :

I love my smartphone and my tablet, but I still feel that I work faster on my desktop computer because of keyboard shortcuts. There are many different ways to bring up commands in SOLIDWORKS, but the use of keyboard shortcuts help me tremendously.

4) Use that “Pack and Go” Tool :

“Pack and Go” in SOLIDWORKS is slightly different from the “Save” and “Save As” tools. Pack and Go only saves the specific part or file you’re working on.

Why does this matter? Because in SOLIDWORKS, parts reference each other within various assemblies. That means that in the case of an error, for every time a part is referenced, the error is multiplied that many times over.

For example, if it’s referenced 10 times in other components, it creates 10 more errors in other files.

That’s why Pack and Go is so valuable to working on a single part - if a mistake is made, the corrections are contained.

Edu ​​​​​​​3DEXPERIENCE ​​​​​​​SOLIDWORKS ​​​​​​​