JANUARY 2012
WNC / ASHEVILLE SWUG MEETING
This meeting was a trip down memory lane. Wes Cobb the founder and group leader since the inception of our user group is stepping down and turning the direction of the group over to Phil Behm. Upon attending SolidWorks World in 2005 Wes came back excited about SolidWorks and wanting more. At the time the closest user group was in Greenville SC but it was inactive. As Wes shared last night he decided to start a group even though he was advised against it. With our first meeting being in September of ’05, the rest is history.
I speak for all the members of the group when I say, “Thanks, Wes”. Because of your hard work and attention to the user group our knowledge of SolidWorks has grown. You have continually lined up excellent presentations for our meeting, made sure that we were well fed and entertained. You are leaving the group in a position that I have no doubt will allow Phil to continue this tradition and make you proud. I officially nominate you for our first entry into the WNC SWUG Hall of Fame!
In the meeting last night Wes recalled some of the humorous events that have happened over the years like the time when Matt Lombard was the presenter and his laptop would not run a newly installed service pack of SolidWorks. Wes came to the rescue with his laptop only to find out that it wouldn’t even boot up.
I remember another Matt Lombard presentation when we didn’t have a projector. Picture Matt holding up his mouse and describing how he would model it.
Then there was the time when Wes had lined up several resellers of third party add-ons for SolidWorks and one of the presenters proceeded to bash everyone else’s products and turn his presentation into a sales pitch.
After Wes’ farewell address Michael Jolley of Trimech took the stage. He basically turned the presentation into a question and answer session. He also pointed out some issues with SolidWorks 2012. I found it refreshing that an application engineer would be willing to tell us that we should wait before installing the new version. Michael spent some time telling us about SolidWorks macros that are available on the web. One of particular interest to several members was the part number generator. You can get the scoop on and download this macro here.
I mentioned a couple of problems that I was having with 2012 but Michael was unable to duplicate them last night. One issue I was having is that we had ‘M’ defined as a shortcut key to bring up the measure command. This has worked fine from all the way back to SW2007 but in 2012 when typing in a dimension and ending it with ‘MM’ to designate millimeters we are thrown out of the dimension command into the measure command… It worked fine on Michael’s machine! So I came in this morning and tried it again and now it works fine on my machine. What’s going on? It must have been a SP 0.0 issue because the only thing that has changed is that we updated to SP 1.0.
Along these lines Michael showed us that when you type ‘S’ to bring up the shortcut menu, the SolidWorks search box is activated with the cursor flashing in it. Previously you would type ‘S’ again to close the shortcut menu but now typing ‘S’ makes an ‘S’ appear in the search box. I did some research on this and a thread on the SolidWorks forums discussing this. There is a solution if you don’t like this behavior. Right click on a toolbar and select ‘Customize’ from the menu, uncheck the box circles in the picture below:
Bob had an interesting problem that we looked at that involved a set size sheet metal blank that bends are added to. He is wanting the blank size to remain the same with the bend angles and flange lengths being changed. Michael had several ideas on how to accomplish this and I think Bob went away with a plan on how to make this work.
Tom wanted to know how unfold a partial cylinder with a cut through it at an angle. After several tries we got this to work correctly. Moral of the story is that you must have legitimate parameters for your sheet metal feature for this to unfold.
Our next meeting will March 8, stay tuned for details.
If you’re going to SolidWorks World be sure to look for me and say hello.
WNC / ASHEVILLE SWUG MEETING
This meeting was a trip down memory lane. Wes Cobb the founder and group leader since the inception of our user group is stepping down and turning the direction of the group over to Phil Behm. Upon attending SolidWorks World in 2005 Wes came back excited about SolidWorks and wanting more. At the time the closest user group was in Greenville SC but it was inactive. As Wes shared last night he decided to start a group even though he was advised against it. With our first meeting being in September of ’05, the rest is history.
I speak for all the members of the group when I say, “Thanks, Wes”. Because of your hard work and attention to the user group our knowledge of SolidWorks has grown. You have continually lined up excellent presentations for our meeting, made sure that we were well fed and entertained. You are leaving the group in a position that I have no doubt will allow Phil to continue this tradition and make you proud. I officially nominate you for our first entry into the WNC SWUG Hall of Fame!
In the meeting last night Wes recalled some of the humorous events that have happened over the years like the time when Matt Lombard was the presenter and his laptop would not run a newly installed service pack of SolidWorks. Wes came to the rescue with his laptop only to find out that it wouldn’t even boot up.
I remember another Matt Lombard presentation when we didn’t have a projector. Picture Matt holding up his mouse and describing how he would model it.
Then there was the time when Wes had lined up several resellers of third party add-ons for SolidWorks and one of the presenters proceeded to bash everyone else’s products and turn his presentation into a sales pitch.
After Wes’ farewell address Michael Jolley of Trimech took the stage. He basically turned the presentation into a question and answer session. He also pointed out some issues with SolidWorks 2012. I found it refreshing that an application engineer would be willing to tell us that we should wait before installing the new version. Michael spent some time telling us about SolidWorks macros that are available on the web. One of particular interest to several members was the part number generator. You can get the scoop on and download this macro here.
I mentioned a couple of problems that I was having with 2012 but Michael was unable to duplicate them last night. One issue I was having is that we had ‘M’ defined as a shortcut key to bring up the measure command. This has worked fine from all the way back to SW2007 but in 2012 when typing in a dimension and ending it with ‘MM’ to designate millimeters we are thrown out of the dimension command into the measure command… It worked fine on Michael’s machine! So I came in this morning and tried it again and now it works fine on my machine. What’s going on? It must have been a SP 0.0 issue because the only thing that has changed is that we updated to SP 1.0.
Along these lines Michael showed us that when you type ‘S’ to bring up the shortcut menu, the SolidWorks search box is activated with the cursor flashing in it. Previously you would type ‘S’ again to close the shortcut menu but now typing ‘S’ makes an ‘S’ appear in the search box. I did some research on this and a thread on the SolidWorks forums discussing this. There is a solution if you don’t like this behavior. Right click on a toolbar and select ‘Customize’ from the menu, uncheck the box circles in the picture below:
Bob had an interesting problem that we looked at that involved a set size sheet metal blank that bends are added to. He is wanting the blank size to remain the same with the bend angles and flange lengths being changed. Michael had several ideas on how to accomplish this and I think Bob went away with a plan on how to make this work.
Tom wanted to know how unfold a partial cylinder with a cut through it at an angle. After several tries we got this to work correctly. Moral of the story is that you must have legitimate parameters for your sheet metal feature for this to unfold.
Our next meeting will March 8, stay tuned for details.
If you’re going to SolidWorks World be sure to look for me and say hello.