The wind was heavy that day my friends, as I remember it, the date was April 12^th, 2012.   It seemed like just another day until over 100 customers and prospects attended Symmetry Solutions: Hook, Line, and SolidWorks Spring Conference event.

Many were baited to come see the likes of Dave Genz, Ice Fishing enthusiast, and Walleye Dan, professional fishing guide.   There weren’t many bobbers in the audience during Mark Pallansch’s discussion of Clam Corporations manual documentation process, as he shared how they utilized 3DVIA Composer to provide parametric-based set up and tear down animations of Ice Houses.  Dave Schluter from St. Croix Rods had his hooks into the audience during his discussion on their implementation of Enterprise Product Data Management.   St. Croix Rods was able to string up their workflows and provide a much more efficient product release process.

The biggest catch of the day was during the technical breakout sessions, as the new SolidWorks Plastics Product offering reeled in the largest audience of the technical breakout.   Other technical varieties included Application Programming Interface (program customization), Simulation (FEA, CFD analysis), Enterprise Product Data Management, and 3DVIA Composer for technical communications.

To close out the day, two lucky winners, Jesse Hahn from SportTech and Mark Bossart from Apnex Medical, bagged themselves a big fishing tale by each taking home a brand new ice fishing house from Clam Corporations. Congratulations!

I very well could have had this conversation while doing tech support…
Dude: Well, I can see that this is some powerful software, but it’s taking a long time to solve and things shouldn’t be this complicated.

Me: Yeah… that’s a pretty… pretty big mesh. I can’t even see the part.

Me: What are you trying to study here?
Dude: The assembly. (Duhhh!)
Me: Yeah, but what about the assembly? Is there a particular part you’re worried about?
Dude: Well, now that you’ve mentioned it, I am pretty concerned about this part.

Me: Okay, we can eliminate these parts and apply equivalent forces on the faces.

Me: Alright, let’s get started! We can use a rough mesh to find the contact forces.

Me: Now, we can eliminate the top pieces from the assembly and create split lines where we would like to apply the equivalent forces.

Me: This is a perfect opportunity to use 2D simplification. Let’s create a new study.

Me: Now, we can afford a pretty heavy mesh control on the component of interest.

Me: If we go into properties and select the option for “Improve accuracy for no penetration contacting surfaces” we’ll get the same results as before with a fraction of the run time.
Dude: Thanks Nick! You’re the best!
Me: I know… I know.

As a member of the Technical Support Team at Symmetry Solutions, each year we are required to be recertified by SolidWorks.  Part of the recertification test is focused on new functionality and features for the latest release of SolidWorks.  As you may or may not know, there is a “What’s New” file for every new release of the software that documents these changes.  You can access this file from your help menu in SolidWorks.  Like many, I am one of those people that scan the document for some highlights when I install each new release.  However, since my recertification test was approaching, I thought I would give it a more thorough read.  You know what I discovered (again)?  There is a lot of good information in that document.  I won’t try and summarize the entire thing, but here is one tip that I think may be useful if you are in the process of updating hardware:

“You can transfer a license from a computer even if SolidWorks is no longer installed on that computer. You can download and run SolidWorks Activation Wizard from the SolidWorks customer portal to transfer the license.”

So now when you get that annoying message about “Activation Count Exceeded” because you forgot to transfer the license off of your old computer, you no longer need to call technical support to resolve the problem.

Note, the tool is new and currently only applies to SW2011 installations.

Take some time and read through the “What’s New” document (again).  It may not be the most fun reading material available, but I recommend it for all SolidWorks users, as it can help you get the most from your software.

P.S.  You will be happy to know that all the members of your SolidWorks Technical Support Team here at Symmetry Solutions passed their recertification test.

Please take a minute to vote and let us know what you’d like us to cover in the upcoming SolidWorks “What’s New For 2011″ Webinar.

Thanks!

Tim had been working on it for years; a perfect clone to assist him in the laboratory.  But to this day, no one knows exactly how it happened.  As he recalls, it was a dark and stormy night.  Tim had the recently dug up corpse on the table.  The electrodes had been placed.  He was waiting for the perfect strike of lightning.  The abandoned factory had been the location of his experiments through the years, but he hoped it would all be over soon.  As he raised the naked body to the lofted ceiling, he backed against a wall of buttons, accidentally releasing a series of chemicals prematurely into the corpse.  A shriek of bright lightning blinded his vision as the barking explosion of thunder jolted him into the lead pipe above his head.  It all went dark.