Hi all,

I’m the SolidWorks Administrator (and Design Engineer) for a fairly large design office, we design large industrial machines and use a wide variety of pneumatic and hydraulic fittings in our designs.

I’m currently trying to compile our SolidWorks routing library but it seems like an overly labour intensive task.

If we take pneumatic fittings as an example:

We use a wide range of standard push in fittings (tee fittings, Y fittings, elbows, crosses etc) for a range of pipe sizes and for a range of threaded port sizes.

Why is it that I cannot download an entire library of such models (suitably configured for various pipe/thread sizes) from a big name manufacturer/supplier that are ready to go with routing points?

It seems bizarre to me that I have to down load individual models of fittings and then convert them into routing parts.  If one manufacturer was willing to put in the time and effort to create an all singing all dancing library of routing parts then I’d be much more inclined to use their fittings over another manufacturer’s ( I do appreciate there would still be a certain amount of alterations to the parts required-addition of design company specific part numbers for example).

I have received CD’s from suppliers that contain a library of their components, but there’s still a lot of work involved in extracting all of the fittings and adding routing points.  And there are no configurations to speak of!!

Maybe I’ve just not looking hard enough and there are such “ready to go” libraries, or maybe the SolidWorks user community isn’t making enough noise about the quality of supplier models.

Am alone in thinking that suppliers should be providing a better modelling service?  Or am I just being lazy?

Adrian