Inventor 2008 Professional user to begin Solidworks 2007. Any obvious gotcha's??

"Jim Strenk" a écrit dans le message de news: X86dneFX6e9ZMJDanZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com...

In the help menu, there is a tutorial that will take you through SW. Never tried it myself... HIH JM

Try making sheet metal parts with angled flanges and then use closed corners, there is a great big "gotcha" there! Angled flanges become 90 degrees again!, lol

Also you will find that the blank sizes, that the shop floor use, differs from the blank size in Solidworks. Check what the shop floor are using, bend deduction, bend allowance etc.....

Cylinders are the worse things to work with, Ahhhhh!, so practice with parts that you already know to be correct.

Try different ways of making sheet metal parts, using normal flanges and bend line flanges. Work from flat to folded,using both methods, then try to work from a solid block to flattened.

There are many ways of getting the end part, but also many ways that will trip you up. Sheet metal is the place, where you really do have to think about the construction.

For example:-

In 2007 xp sp4.0 and below, you can not use the edge flange tool to get a bigger flange than the base flange! If you are prototyping, you will then have to totally redraw a part, because the design has changed, requiring a larger flange! Nuts or what!

Hope this starts you off! :-)

Pete,

What's this that you are saying? I don't believe I have ever seen this and I have used closed corner on non-90° edge flanges. Do you have an example you could send me?

WT

Wayne, If you can give me contact details or a site to send the file too, I will.

Regards Pete

Just send me an email based on my address here, but removing the instructed characters.

WT

The same rule applies for any Acad product user..... Erase all instances of any Acad processes, habits, shortcuts, and especially ass-backward Acad function sequences, and you will be fine. The most annoying comment I ever hear from prior Acad users is "BUT in Autocad, I would do it like this!" Especially from the ones who said "But in Acad I re-wrote my own menus, macros, hotkeys...... etc. etc..

If I had a dollar for everytime I whacked them in the head after that statement, I'd be on permanent vacation somewhere....

Other than that, you will be way ahead > I expect to begin self-taught training using Solidworks 2007 within the next

You want to forget what you think you know about how to do things.

Then do the tutorials in Help. Do all of them. Then take some common item and model it. Go from model to assembly to drawing. Keep the item simple at first. It isn't the geometry you are after but the flow of the program. Keep help open and let your curiosity be your guide.

Then, take the most common features, extrude, revolve, fillet and dig into them. Try to use every option and feature and keep track of what they do.

Then take some assemblies and do configurations and exploded views. Again look at all the config options, especially those having to do with BOM and drawings.

Then do drawings of things with configs and use all the various drawing views. Figure out how to make the views SW doesn' t support like cabinet.

Keep notes as you go. Wordpad is the best because you can paste in screen shots but it isn't as ungainly as Word.

TOP

I pretty much used the Help>Tutorials to prepare for the Certified SolidWorks Professional exam. SolidWorks and Inventor are essentially the same - you should have no trouble. Select an entity before Convert Entites (Project Geometry). Many of the tools you are used to using you will have to Customize Sketch and Features toolbars or use the pull-down menues.

JD Mather Certified SolidWorks Professional Autodesk Inventor Certified Expert