A neat trick... 08/17/2009
 
I found a new way to do something in SolidWorks that has really made my life easier.  When I'm roughing out an assembly either of my design or the customer's I often have two identical parts which are properly the same part used twice in the assembly.  But during the design process the two identical parts suddenly need to be different in some way.  If it is a very simple difference then I will add configurations to the part but more times than not I will actually do a save as of the part and make changes to the newly saved part.



This is how I've been doing this for years but there are some problems.  If you open a part from the assembly and then do a save-as, all the instances of this part within the assembly will be renamed...so I didn't accomplish anything.  So I've been opening the part from the assembly, closing the assembly and then doing the save-as.  I then open the assembly back up and replace the single part instance with the new created part.  This works but it is a lot of opening and closing and then reopening of assembly files and so this is my new solution.

 

With the assembly open, act like you are going to open another file by clicking on the ‘open’ icon or selecting File->Open.  In the open file dialog box select the file you need a different instance of but don’t double click or click the open button.  Now do a ‘Ctrl-C’ followed by a ‘Ctrl-V’.  You will see a new file appear that will be named something like this, ‘Copy of XXXX.sldprt’ where XXXX is the original file name.  Now click twice slowly on this new file and type the name you wish for it to have keeping the file extension the same.  Click on the ‘Cancel button’ without opening anything.

 

Now back in the assembly use the replace component command to replace the instance of the original part with the newly created part.  Now you can open the new part and make the necessary changes.

This is pretty dirt simple Windows stuff but it had never dawned on me before, hopefully it will also be useful to you.


 
 


Comments

Wes Cobb

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 11:04:53

Jeff, neat trick. Almost common sense but common sense seems to be something we discount when using our "software of choice!!

Good Blog!!

 

Wes Cobb

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 08:40:17

Jeff, add this TIP to your "Tips and Tricks"

 



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