Wrist pain

Did the same thing in the 1980s with a Kensington mouse running 8+ hrs a day.

I had to learn to relax the tension in my whole forearm. Sometimes I found I was pressing the mouse buttons with a lot of force.

I moved to a much smaller mouse simply because it feels better. I use a wireless USB chargeable BT500 now, even though it is not considered a "serious CAD" mouse:

No advanced features, but the Logitech Trackman Wheel is the most comfortable device I've found. It takes a week or two to get acclimated. Since there's no wrist motion at all, you can rest your whole forearm all the time. The thumb does all the ball motion.

good ol' bob z. uses a micro$oft trackball explorer (now defunct!) at work and he uses an iPen Pro II at home. this thing is just like a ball-point pen. it has a left-click in the tip and a right-click with scroll right below your index finger. the iPen is not perfect for cad. swx requires you to be able to somewhat accurately right-click on items - the iPen is not exactly conducive to this environment.

the point that bob z. would like to make is this - the key to minimizing the repetitive motion stress is to MIX IT UP! for example, use a mouse at home - use a trackball at work. bob z. was using a trackball at home, as well, as at work. the benefits of using a trackball seemed to go away after some time.

Bo mentioned that he had to learn to relax. bob z. can not stress this enough. bob z. is about as tightly wound as formula 1 car at full-bore. once you find a job where you can be comfortable and work without a ton of stress, the pain in the hand, arms, wrist, and fingers will subside.

good luck!

bob z. :~)>

I found that excersize using the hands and arms helped a lot.

Bicycling, swimming and rowing all helped me, because it put loads on the lower arms in far different ways.

I must admit I like to use a laptop trackpad for SolidWorks.

Bo

I had a similar problem and found this mouse pad gel wrist support took away my aches. I was skeptic at first but it did the trick.

I am sure there are other manufacturers out their but thought I would post the link to give you an idea.

David

If it is a MicroSoft mouse you are using did you read the safety information that came with the mouse?

Get a Kensington trackball. Switch between left and right handed mouse operation. Kensington has a timer that reminds you to rest and stretch after a set interval.

I had horrible problems years ago. I know some folks who actually had to have wrist surgery due to carpal tunnel. Not a good thing.

I did not want to get there, so... I designed and fabricated my own desk. All standard desks are absolute crap when it comes to using a computer. They are designed for reading a document sitting on the surface or writing on a piece of paper on the surface, that's it.

This is what you need:

- Monitor resting surface, 29 inches off the ground.

- Keyboard/Trackball resting surface, about four inches below that

- At the edge of the keyboard/trackball shelf, a nice fat piece of oak about 1.5 to 2 inches high/wide in cross section. It should be long enough to span the keyboard and mouse area in front of you. Edges nicely rounded and sanded. Oiled with Tung oil for smoothness. Your forearms should rest on this chunk-o-wood nicely. Your hands should feel like they are working down into a cavity where the keyboard and trackball live. My shelf is about four feet wide. I have room on both sides for a coffee cup and other items that I might want to have handy (calipers?).

- A good chair. I use the Aeron chairs.

Now, the keyboard/trackball shelf must be solid. By this I mean, you should be able to pound on it with your fist and it should feel just as solid as the surface of a good desk. The crummy keyboard shelves they sell at the store are way to flimsy. You don't want anything retractable.

I welded the structure out of 16ga steel tubing. The work and keyboard surfaces are made of furniture-grade plywood with nice looking formica laminate applied.

Notice I said "trackball". You don't want a mouse. You don't even want any old trackball. Get a thumb-operated trackball. Keep it clean and make sure that the ball rolls ultra smoothly.

I've used this rig for over six years, 18 hours a day, 7 days a week at times, no problems whatsoever.

Of course, you have to take breaks and it is a good idea to exercise. I row, mostly.

The closest commercial product I found are the Biomorph desks:

They don't have the forearm support I built into my workstation, but for the most part, what they offer is what I custom designed and built many years ago (before they were out with their interesting products).

-Martin

How about posting some pics?

After a few years pushing a mouse around I had similar problems too. My remedy was to use a spaceball in one hand (cuts out a lot of mouse work if you can get used to it) and a mouse in the other, at the beginning of each a month swap hands and use the spaceball and mouse with the opposite hands. Using the mouse with your wrong hand takes a bit of getting used to but it helps prevent repetitive by using different muscles etc. It works for me as I no longer have problems, although I am left handed and used to performing tasks with both hands.

I had symptoms similar to this once; it was carpal tunnel which if untreated, can require surgery. Here are my recommendations:

1. I highly recommend you take a look at the 3DConnexion space pilot (
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   ). It lets you use both hands to work with. Besides relieving the work load on the mouse hand, it improves productivity greatly, especially when working with assemblies. You can justify the cost ( 0.00 when we bought ours a year ago) on that alone.
2. Learn to switch hands with the mouse; it takes a little effort to learn but once you do it'll relieve the load on the mouse hand. I switch the mouse and space pilot about once a month.
3. As others have mentioned, execise and relaxation for the hands and arms are also very effective.

This is a common hazard for cad operators as you can tell from the number of replies. It was also a hot topic on the solidworks users forum a few weeks ago.

Good Luck and get that hand taken care of right away.

Do you row a boat or a machine? I found that rowing a boat created other problems for me.

I found that their driver slows down the system. Has it gotten any better? Ours is sitting on a shelf doing nothing.

-Martin

Sure. Does CCS have a site for such uploads?

-Martin

Both. C2 machine and single shell. No problems once you develop the requisite callouses. I prefer the boat as it adds a layer of relaxation that the machine can't.

-Martin

Martin,

Try

Once your image is uploaded, the host site will give the URL of the image for use in these fora.

Stolen from CBL on Eng-Tips.com.

Reaper.

One of the guys I work with has had a lot of trouble with his wrists. He found that the Ergo Rest arm support that clamps on to the edge of his desk helped. In fact, he uses one for each arm. I still see him wearing a strap on wrist support on his mouse arm every once in a while, so it didn't completely get rid of his difficulties.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

I have had serious RSI problems too after using Solidworks. Before Solidworks I used Autocad and didn't have any problems. In my case the RSI was caused by the intense use of precise mouse movements and excessive scrolling that the userinterface needs in Solidworks.

Solidworks has much more scrolling and precise mousemovents then most other Cad systems and it is getting worse almost every release with trees and propertymangagers getting bigger showing more and more (often useless) information that needs to be scrolled away. The precise mouse movements and scrolling caused my RSI problems. I know there are many types of RSI problems caused by several types of repetitive work and it is different for anybody but a typical "mouse hand" injury is often caused by the excessive use of the mouse.

There are no selection adjustments like aperture or pickbox like in Autocad which really eases the selection and avoids the precise mousemovements and that really is a shame for RSI problems in Solidworks.

I found solutions in making as much as possible shortcuts on the left hand with alt, shift, ctrl and a combination of these. Further I have reprogrammed some often used functions to avoid the endless mousemovements to and from the tree and property managers. The idea is to have as much as possible small popups invoked by shortkeys on the left hand that allow the right hand mouse input almost without moving the mouse.

Further, Solidworks is really driving me crazy when you use a couple of windows open at the same time because the size of the propertymanagers and therefore the commands you can see are restricted to the size of the window and number of open windows. You have to scroll or windows maximize all the time only to see your command options. This is really a pain, liturally.

The property manager user interface of Solidworks is restricted to the size of your window and number of open windows and this is a real Solidworks problem, no other CAD software I know has this problem and limitation. It keeps you scrolling on end or windows minimize/maximize, it is a serious userinterface problem.

This propertymanager userinterface is easy to learn but hard to drive as it needs a lot of additional scrolling or windows maximize commands only to see your commands when working with multiple windows, something Windows was desigined for. It is really strange to see the first Windows solidmodeller chooses this userinterface that causes a lot of unnecessairy mouse interaction when working with multiple windows.

I wish that Solidworks would look much better at the excessive precise and tedious mouse driven user interface, it could be ways better than this. It could help prevent a lot of users RSI problems.

You should stop if you have RSI symptoms and really do something about it, the trigger level is getting smaller if you stress it. I have tested trackballs and unfortunately it didn't work for me.

I use an absolute tablet and I made the mouse bigger and changed the length of the mousekeys. I use my hand in a completely natural positions and it rests on the mouse with all fingers and polse straight. Under the mouse I taped a piece of teflon and the movements are coming out of my arm, no polse or fingers.

desks:

You may want to consider getting a good ergonomist to take a look at your work area, and to also look at how you sit. While people have given a lot of good suggestions for what to do to stop any cumulative trauma disorders (carpal tunnel), the suggestions don't matter if you are not shown and taught how to properly use the items, and how best to sit.