hello, my work is requiring me to draw some of our products in the form of 2D engineering drawings (the 3D models would be far too time consuming and difficult). i'd like to know if solidworks has some sort of a "sketch mode" where i can generate 2D engineering drawings WITHOUT first constructing the accompanying 3D solid model. i'm just learning the software and was wondering if i should just use autocad for this, although i'd much rather not. thanks for any info!
You can use all sketch tools to create a drawing without 3D-model..Are you really sure that 3D model would be that difficult..? If I have to draw a simple box, I would create 3D model and drawing out of that..why? Because then what I have is parametric model and when dimensions ar changing it's faster to update the drawing (vs A*toC*D). And when model gets more complicated it's even faster.
The more difficult the geometry, the more reason to to model it in 3D. The drawings are practically free. In my many years of building things based on
2D drawings, I have NEVER seen any design of any complexity that wasn't just full of errors. Parts had to be remade, extra holes all over the place, just a mess. Your not saving any time, your just moving it downstream. This rarely (if ever) happens when using solids.
SW is not designed as, or intended to be used as a free standing 2D system. It doesn't work well that way. To much sketch geometry bogs it down. If you really "want" to (or are more comfortable) doing your work in 2D, use ACAD.
What I really think you should do is get some training.
If the only thing you are interested in is 2D drawings, then use AutoCAD, and forget productivity. When I first got into using AutoCAD, I thought it was great. No more sharpening pencils, no more graphite, not more eraser scraps. Unfortunately, we only used AutoCAD as an electronic drafting table, and that's about all you can use it for. We had problems with our drawings because some users were changing dimensions without changing the geometry.
The company I worked for switched to SolidWorks about 4.5 years ago, and I will never go back. We had to get thru a short learning curve, but our drawings are accurate because our SolidWorks models are accurate. If we change a few dimensions in the model, the model geometry updates, the drawings update, the parent assemblies and drawings (all the way up to the final assembly) now show the new geometry.
As Mark mentioned, the drawings are practically free, because SolidWorks updates all of the geometry, in all assembly levels and drawings. A drawing change becomes a change to the model geometry, then quickly documenting the change in the drawing.
You can extract information from the models (mass properties, center of gravity, etc...) that you cannot get from AutoCAD. AutoCAD cannot do interference detection, but it's easy to do in SolidWorks.
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