Many of us have been arms wide open to the new section view assist tool that was released with SolidWorks 2013 but for those who have yet to make the move, this blog is for you.  I have seen it a few times now, a customer calls in and is finding that their jogged section view is stretched when this is not the view they intended.  Generally, the option for creating a “foreshortened section view” or “an aligned section view” comes up when selecting a jogged section line for creation of the section view.  This message can and is often times dismissed leaving the user to default to the last selection.  One option is to clear this message from the System Options under messages/errors/warnings; the second option is the topic of this blog.

Let’s take a look at an example of a created section view, I have sketched in my line, inferenced my geometry and selected the section view.  I was prompted the above notice in which I wanted to create an aligned section view for purposes of this post.

The section view was created and as you can see an aligned section view was generated from my selected sketch line.

Now this may not be the desired section view, so how can I go about creating a foreshortened section view where the projection is normal to the cutting line?  Simple!  If you go back to the option of the two, you will see in the description that “Construction lines are excluded from the view.”

I can simply edit the sketched line that I used to create the initial aligned view, but change the vertical sketched line to construction lines.

After this has been done, simply exit the sketch and your section view will update to a foreshortened section view.

So 2012  is now released, and they have finally fixed a couple of things that had changed if you upgraded to Windows 7 or Vista. If you never used XP with a Workgroup vault, you may not be aware of these functions. You used to be able to browse the vault from the “SolidWorks Open” dialog. There was a link on the left in the favorites along with Desktop and My Documents. In 2012, they have brought this back for users of Windows 7 and Vista. It is a little different then it is in XP as it is not added to favorites, but it still gets the files you want to open.

The button can be found at the bottom of the open dialog. When selected, it opens a “Select from Vault” dialog that allows you to browse the vault. By default, it is set to check out and if you just select “Check Out” it will go back to the SolidWorks Open and this will then point to the check out location called out in the Workgroup client options. There is also the “Check Out Advanced.” This will open the standard check out dialog for Workgroup and populate with the selected files from the Select from Vault. This makes it easier to open a file to a specific configuration even if it was not last saved to that one.

There is also one thing that is not listed in the “Whats New for 2012″  but I have had a few customers bring this up as being an annoyance.This is also primarily seen in Windows 7 & Vista. This has to do with searching in the vault from inside SolidWorks. So you set up the search criteria and tell it to “Find” and it searches down the Vault View Tree. When it finds the first to meet the criteria it stops and highlights the file in the tree. Really it does, but it is very light and not always easy to see. Recently, I received a fixed SPR notification for this issue and you can now actually see the highlighted file. Once again, this is not an issue if you are still using Windows XP as you could adjust the brightness of the monitor if this was not visible enough.

Before SolidWorks 2011 borrowing a license was a little cumbersome as you had to make sure to borrow a Standard seat as well as a Professional or Premium if you wanted extra add-ins. Also the list of possible products was extremely long and had nothing to do with what licenses you purchased.

In SolidWorks 2011 there were changes made to the borrow function to clean up the user interface. It now shows only what  licenses you purchased and you no longer need to select a Standard license to be able to use the software.

For example on my license manager I do not own a seat of Standard so it shows zero available but I have plenty of Premium. This is working as designed and if yours looks this way not to worry. Going forward you do not need to borrow the Standard. It will do this for you as the License Manager knows you need this.

That doesn’t mean you cannot borrow a Standard license if you want it takes a second step to do so. The process involves selecting, for example, the Premium that is available and click “Borrow”. Then the Select Product dialog comes up and this has a pull down that allows you to take either the Premium or just the Standard.

Once the product is selected I can then click OK and it will show me what I have borrowed and until when. Now at this time you need to disconnect from the server to be able to use the borrowed license. If you do not disconnect you will just take another license from the pool.

Do you ever find yourself using the same feature over and over again?  Or maybe your new designs share many similar features.  Hopefully you already know you can copy features from one part to another (Ctrl+Drag between tiled document windows), but a better solution for a feature that you want to re-use over and over again is to add it to your Design Library. Here’s a couple quick tips:

Pick the feature(s) you want to re-use from your Feature Manager Tree (you can pick multiple features with your Ctrl key).  Then from the Design Library Tab, pick the Add to Library command  .

In the Property manager you can give your library feature a file name and description which will appear in a tool tip if you were to hover over the file in your library.  Hit the green check.

Click for Hi Res Image

You can further customized the Library feature part to make it more customizable by opening it up from the library folder.  You may want to consider simplifying the original model to remove features you are not re-using.

And you can use the Folders at the top of the Feature Tree in your library part to control how the features behave when inserted into a new part.

The Reference folder shows the references that you’ll be prompted for when bringing in the features.  You can Rename them hereto be more descriptive.  And the Dimension folder allows you to rename the dimensions that will be copied into your new design and you can also move them into the Location Dimensions folder if you want them to be editable on inserting the feature, or in the Internal Dimensions folder if you do not want users to be able to access them.

Always remember to test!  You can drag and drop you library feature part into a new part to test it out and make sure you get the behavior you expect…

Click for Hi Res Image

For more information on this topic, our subscription service customers can check out my recorded webinar on our Events Page.  Here’s a link:  http://symsolutions.com/events-and-webinars.html

Click the link below to check out a step by step tutorial on creating a curved helix in SolidWorks: