You suppress one feature and everything underneath it gets suppressed. You cringe, a volcano erupts under the sea and five babies are born, slapped and all at once and named Llyod. Don’t you wish those ornery SolidWorks Features would just behave sometimes?

Well there just so happens to be, not one, but two single ways to make sure your features will always work for the configuration you need them in. What is it?? We could choke it up to ‘having a plan’ but that just won’t do. We need specifics and that’s what we’re about to drop on ya.

Now, if you use configurations, within the mayhem of part version creation and feature suppression, you’ll know creating features to work well with those configurations can be a fine art. Fortunately, there’s the FeatureManager and a nice little thing called history.

The history (stack of features) can cause some pain, but it can also allow you to manipulate and locate feature to work perfectly for what you need to show in each configuration. That’s a single thing, but not the two single things we need to focus on.

The two ways to set up features for making them more useful in configurations are…