Solidworks tips and tricks

[jamierose]

Originally Posted by Peck

Hey all you Solidworks guys out there, I'm looking to learn every tip and trick I can about the software and how to be faster (and I'm sure others would have no problem with learning to be faster too.) any tips and tricks you can throw down for me to practice would be great.

for starters, here are a few I already know:

• in assemblies, you can mate parts by holding alt while dragging a face or edge to touch the face or edge you want to mate it to.
• sketches can be used multiple times
• sketches can be moved from one face to another by using the "sketch plane" option when you right click on the sketch in the feature manager.

Pressing alt does create a mate, but at least in SolidWorks 2010, it doesn't always work.

Although I don't have too much experience with it, I once tried using it to mate two circular edges so I wouldn't have to create separate coincident and concentric mates. I tried multiple times, but nothing changed, and no mates were created.

On the other hand, though, it can save a lot of time for some quick mates, but you have to be able to see both things you want to mate at the same time. If you need to rotate the view for a mate, I don't think it works.