Ricky Huynh is a SOLIDWORKS senior applications engineer with Hawk Ridge Systems based in Mountain View, California. He specializes in SOLIDWORKS, Composer, and Electrical. He graduated from UC Davis in 2010 with a B.S. in mechanical engineering.
For cycling fans, the month of July signifies the Tour de France. For a race of that undertaking, nobody can conquer it on their own. A successful race depends on top-of-the-line products, a deep bench of knowledge, and a strong team behind these cyclists – and the same can be said of engineers.
In our recent live stream event, we brought together members of the Hawk Ridge Systems technical team to showcase some of their favorite SOLIDWORKS features and time-saving tips.
You may have noticed something interesting when searching for SOLIDWORKS Explorer in your Windows Taskbar search recently – it’s not there! What happened? In 2020, SOLIDWORKS has replaced SOLIDWORKS Explorer with SOLIDWORKS File Utilities. Luckily, they retained many of the important functions like Pack and Go, Rename, Replace, and Move with just a right-click in your File Explorer window.
Looking for ways to hide and show components in an assembly in SOLIDWORKS? These tricks are especially useful when trying to apply mates or seeing what’s hidden under a component without changing its transparency. We’ll be looking at hiding and showing components with the ‘eye’ icon, Display Pane and the Tab key.
So, you’ve successfully learned how to build your part and now you're ready to create your first assembly. Congratulations! Once you’ve inserted your components (via ‘Insert Components’, dragging and dropping, etc), let’s move on to mating. One of the great benefits of SOLIDWORKS is that there are multiple ways to accomplish the same result, and that also goes for mating! We’ll discuss how we can use the Mates menu, Quick Mates and SmartMates to get you up and running.
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you needed to dimension to a virtual sharp? Luckily, there are multiple ways to create a virtual sharp in SOLIDWORKS, as well as different display options.
Let’s look at creating a virtual sharp in a sketch. When inside of a sketch, hold down Ctrl, select the two sketch entities and then select the Point tool on the Sketch tab. Once it appears, you can reference it like you would any other point.
