Well, here’s a little bit more of a jab. Something with a little more pepper… and some delicious example files and further explanation on how you can get a more robust assembly.
What’s in the box?
Three example of how to create assemblies. They’re super simple and all use simple commands. You get:
Download them here – assembly methodolgy.zip (880kb)
Are you ready to mix this up? Cue the music maestro.
Deep in the heart of Wisconsin, a guy named Lloyd told a guy named Lenny, “You gotta help me out. SolidWorks needs to add a way to put a ‘Geometry Lock’ on a SolidWorks model that would reduce rebuild times. Can you dig it?” (embellishment added)
I can dig it Lloyd and we’ll help out. An enhancement request sound like just the right medicine.
The light spills in through the windows of your studio. You’re sketching things up, importing illustrations, optimizing models here and there, and making the most beautifully designed product a consumer has ever seen. You have a perfect balance between a love for esthetically pleasing design and what you went to engineering school for.
However, there are a lot of engineering and design professionals that find themselves on one side desiring more involvement in the other. This is especially true for engineers that have a bit of a creative tendency. Like when you see a product and smile because you know how it goes together and what it took to manufacture it, but still, your amazed at the appearance and wonder why that aspect seems familiar yet somewhat foreign. Then you see something that is completely hideous and wonder who they drug out of the potato factory to design it. Either way, the design has caught your attention and you get that twitch called inspiration.
“The Engineer who can Draw”
I recently read an article talking about the disembodied engineer. Poor guy. Confused about life, secretly wanting to add a curve here or there, unable to add an ounce of industrial savvy inspiration and constantly foiled by the whims of bracket-happy stress engineers.
…this can end up producing a working engineer or recent graduate with the dull, sinking feeling that they’ve spent the best years of their life struggling up the wrong professional ladder.
Don’t tear up now. It’s a revealing article from a design perspective. But guess what? Just because you enjoy Prismacolors and Balsa wood more than adding numbers and brackets doesn’t mean you have to pull up your roots and switch to being a designer. You’re actually in a better spot. You have the training in engineering, and the interest in design. But how do you find that balance you desire to be involved in design and engineering?
Keep the video game addicts back. There’s a new game (about to be) in town. Crayon Physics. A game where you draw 2D shapes that turn into physical objects to do your bidding and solve the puzzles. Yeah, I know it’s 2D, but I’d call it Cool-D. That’s like 50 levels above 2D. Check out…
In case you’ve made a comment and didn’t see it show up, hold tight. I am using a shiny new plugin called Defensio that tightens and controls the spaminess of comments. It’s in the process of learning so it may accidently quarantine a comment here or there. If you have a Wordpress blog, I highly…