One of the many advantages of any CAD system is the ability to reuse design data in new designs.  Copying an existing design and then making changes has saved companies tremendous amounts of time and money.  Here is an easy way to reuse a design including the drawings and save it with a new file name.

Saving a new assembly

The example I’m going to show is an assembly – some of the parts will be modified for the new assembly and some will be reused as is.  There are drawings of the components and a drawing of the assembly.  I want to reuse the assembly, assembly drawing, several of the components and their drawings.

• With the assembly drawing active, do a File > Save As
• Browse to the location and enter the filename for the new assembly.
       
  
      
• Click the References button. 
• The helical gears are not going to change in my new assembly so I’m not going to do anything to those. 
• Highlight the paths in the Folder column for the remaining parts and Browse to the location where the new parts will be saved.  The paths change to green.
      
  
• Since we don’t want to create duplicate files, the next thing to do is add a prefix to the filenames.
• Highlight the filenames, click Add prefix, add a value in the box, and hit Apply.  Instead of adding a prefix you can also change the file names individually by double clicking in the cell.
        
  
   
• The filenames that are changed will turn green.
• Select Save All and you have created six new files maintaining the correct references in the new assembly and drawing.
    
  

Saving part drawings

So far we created new parts, a new assembly, and new assembly drawing.  Nothing has been done with the drawings of the parts.  We want to reuse those also for the new design, so use this procedure with each drawing.

• In Windows Explorer, copy the drawing of the original part to the folder where the new assembly is located and rename it.
• In SolidWorks, go to File > Open, browse to the drawing file, but don’t hit Open yet.
• Select the References … button
• Double click on the filename of the part and browse to the new part and click Open
• Click OK
• Save the drawing.

This procedure is a safe way to copy models and drawings that will be reused and reduces the risk of overwriting your existing files or messing up the file references.