Solid Works. 3D design

In article , Peter Neill writes

Yes, that looks very neat Peter. Thanks.

David

Good Gods man! You posted it to a recreational model engineering newsgroup.

If you really expected it to not draw any flack, you guessed wrong.

Most of the guys that have a solid need for software of this nature, are well aware of the market, in which, IMO, Solidworks ranks fairly well.

Posting a straight commercial post anywhere on usenet is liable to draw the wingnuts out of the wings, anyway.

FWIW the only tactic I have seen work is to be a participant in the group, and avoid the hard sell. Even then, you have to deal with the loons that think "spam" is anything remotely commercial, even if it IS relatively on topic with the newsgroup subject.

Posting using a hotmail address is kinda cheesy too. Leaves the impression that you are trying to hide something. If you want to not come across like a seller of dodgy copies, an email address that relates to the business is always good. Lends an air of credibility.

As far as I'm concerned, there is no real reason not to post the info that you did, but the hotmail addy was perhaps the very first thing that put me off the whole thing.

Having no sense of humor about the resultant flurries, that just shows, well, a lack of a sense of humor. Show a little class, man, it works much better than tantrums, even mild ones. Usenet is pretty near the wild west, as far as civility goes. Grow a thicker skin and carry on.

Got any links to any really cool work done with solidworks?

Cheers Trevor Jones

Gosh, that looks strangely familiar Peter :-)

The full blown Cosmos is extremely impressive, and as it comes bundled with the top spec Solidworks is relatively quite a bargain. It handles assemblies, motion, and all sorts of very useful stuff. I've only seen a brief demo at a seminar, but I was very impressed. They simulated a centrifugal clutch assembly, pushing the springs out as the speed increased and the friction between the pads and the outer of the clutch. You could work out at what speed it would operate under different load conditions and how much power it could transmit, etc. I think the version of solidworks with all this in is around £7k. I did consider it for work, but it was more than we needed -the basic version is enough for most of what we ever need. Worth a chat with you local Solidworks VAR to get the full picture.

Regards Kevin

That job was a nice little earner for a few years:)

I did that model to prove something or other to Bernie at the time, as he was still drawing everything up in etch-a-sketch.

Did they ever decide which form of alternative hub drive they wanted on the new tool you were making Kevin, or are they still making their minds up?

Peter

I doubt you would sell a copy to anyone on this list after showing your arse like this.

Wes

First off, I use Solidworks on an almost daily basis, mainly working on various motorsport projects. It's definitely an eye-opener when your previous CAD experience is limited to Autocad (in both 2 and

3d). It's very good for projects where things change regularly in the design, but then so is just about every other parametric CAD package. I think ease of use is probably where it scores best.

A word of warning to David though - the inbuilt stress analysis (CosmosXpress) can give misleading results as it doesn't allow much control over the mesh etc used for the FEA analysis - leading easily to meshes which are too coarse to accurately model stress concentrations etc. It's useful when you're developing a design to get an idea of the stresses within the part, but I wouldn't use it as a substitute for a full final FEA analysis using it's big brother CosmosWorks or something like ABAQUS or Patran. How do I know this - I learnt the hard way.....

Cheers

Alastair

In article , Alastair writes

Thanks for that, Alastair

David