I do a lot of enclosure design in plastics and one of thechallenges of this is to design several versions of the enclosurein a very short space of time whilst showing alternatives forlayouts of pcbs, batteries, displays, switches etc. A lot of thetime the electronics designers need to get feedback from me beforethey can finish the design process for the pcbs and certifications.

One of the issues I have with doing everything inside SolidWorks isthat the interface is just so clunky for manipulating parts in aconceptual manner. It is fine once you know exactly what you wantbut for thinking.....

My workflow at the moment is to model up the various PCBs andcomponents (either from stock models or from scratch as freqentlythe enclosure needs designing before the pcb design is finalised soall I am interested in is the bounding box for the pcb and parts),then to arrange them and then design an outside surface for thepackage.

By far the trickiest part of this in SW is the arranging of theparts. For reasons of speed and ease I use part environments withmulti bodies and import the various components as parts. Andtherein lies the problem. All I want to do is just drag the partsaround, rotate them, line them upetc. Yes I can use the translateand mate tools but these are very very clunky compared to those inthe assembly environment (why!!).

So how do others do it. What issues do you face. Do you agree thatparts handling like above is slow and tedious. How about a historyfree translate? Am I missing a trick or two (probably).SolidworksGeneral