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I just need a little help to get me started, designing Cabinets

Dose anyone have any examples of Cabinets in Solidworks that can be easily adjusted with parameters, similar to the cabinet editor in Cabinet Vision: Where you can input a set of parameters and the cabinet gets constructed automatically; such as, Cabinet width, height, depth, drawers, faces, doors, etc. I understand that I will need envelopes, configurations, equations, tables, Assembly Layout Sketch, etc. I just need a little help to get me started, dose anyone know of any interesting Add-Ins or Macros that might help.

Thanks for your help Ian, snipped-for-privacy@msn.com

Reply to
Ian
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Actually you need something called a configurator. Ask your VAR. I can't remember the one my VAR has. Also there have been some presented here. Search on Zward or Zwaard if memory serves.

Reply to
TOP

use the search string in Google: configurator and solidworks

Reply to
Bo

E-mail of Jan-Jurjen Zwaard: info at studiozwaard dot nl He did make some kind of configurator

Reply to
\/\/im

Why not try "Driveworks"? It was intended for exactly what you're talking about.

Richard

Reply to
Richard Charney

Hi,

My experience in designing cabinets (19", electrical...) this way has let to disaster for two reasons (I did not use the above mentioned "configurator", I do not know what it is...):

- My own limited understanding of the idiocyncracies of the SW software and its internal workings.

- Stability issues with Solidworks, especially when modifying parameters.

I did ultimately manage to finish the "job" but that required quiet an effort to get through.

In brief, I did the whole cabinet in a SW "part" (by using "merge" selectively - I gather that this is a recommened practice) and used "split" to generate the individual parts and did minor detailing, etc. Then the assembly was created to check for mistakes... All dimensions is controlled by parametric stuff in the original part.

Hope this helps.

Vinodh Kumar M.

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Reply to
GreenHex

And it seemed to work pretty good.

Reply to
TOP

There can be a bit of a problem trying to make a really smart assembly driven set of parts and that comes from the inability of SW to keep track of edges, faces and vertices when things change. It didn't used to be as bad as it is now, but it can lead to real problems with robustness. Faces can be named which can help, but edges and vertices cannot be named. And digging out a face name or even knowing which faces are named can be a lot of work.

For this reason a configurator makes a lot of sense because it transcends most of these problems.

Reply to
TOP

A couple of years ago I helped a furniture company create a set of templates for panels, doors, windows, drawers and cabinets to replace the Cabinet Vision product. I didn't create the interface, but did all of the models behind the scenes.

As I remember, this was all done with multibodies saved out to individual parts and brought back together as an assembly. It's true, the reseller did try to sell them RuleStream and possibly DriveWorks, but could just as easily be done with a little VBA and Excel.

It's definitely doable.

Matt

Reply to
matt

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