Articles by Scott Woods

There are more options for 3D CAD than ever before – with SOLIDWORKS alone there are three distinct choices. In this article, I'll break down these options to make your decision for a CAD solution easier.

First, let’s start with SOLIDWORKS desktop, the easy one.

SOLIDWORKS desktop has been the industry standard 3D CAD package for manufacturing since the early 1990s. SOLIDWORKS desktop offers complete 3D CAD design software that is installed locally on your computer. It is a proven solution and includes a complete design package for parts, assemblies, and drawings. This is our CAD tool of choice for most situations and design teams of all sizes.

The world of CAD is evolving and that’s a good thing. Like with all technology, advancement is good, if it’s controlled.   

To start off, let's take a little peek back to the beginning of CAD.

With the invention of Sketchpad in 1964, computer-aided design, or CAD as it’s widely known, was introduced to the world. 

Like any new technology, there was a bit of skepticism, and its adoption was not immediate. In the early 80s Autodesk’s 2D AutoCAD and Dassault Systèmes’ 3D CATIA entered the market. 

Subdivision (Sub-D) modeling is all about making organic modeling easy. If you are a fan of push-and-pull control points (nurbs) we got you covered. SOLIDWORKS has always been an analytical parametric modeling software and that has not changed. What has changed is having the ability to develop organic shapes in-line with your mechanical designs.

In this article, we’ll be discussing First Article Inspection (FAI) reports and covering a basic strategy for creating them in the SOLIDWORKS Inspection standalone program. But first, what is FAI all about?

FAI utilizes an industry set of standards, it typically consists of three sections referred to as Form 1, 2 and 3. Forms 1 and 2 are populated with drawing properties such as drawing title, part name, revision, unit of measure and material, while Form 3 contains the nominal value and tolerance of each inspection-required dimension.

Stop wasting time and money waiting for products to be manufactured before creating assembly instructions. With SOLIDWORKS Composer and SOLIDWORKS Visualize, you can repurpose 3D models into valuable documentation pieces.