Solidworks Workflow – Part & Assembly Design

Preliminary Workflow description for modeling….

In 2004 I had a one on one Advanced Assembly SolidWorks training with Neil Sardinas from Prism Engineering
our VAR at that time and he had a model of an entire Steam Engine Train Car complete with the Coal Car, it was
an impressive model, the largest I have ever seen. I remember he was working on the Coal Oil Lamps then. The
entire train was done in separate zones and each zone was independent of the next zone, but an integral part of
the entire assembly. I forget how many zones he had it broken down to, I’m thinking dozens. The neat part was
you could have had that many people working on the project, because everything was split and each split or
connection points had the same connecting information, once the assemblies were dropped in a main assembly
there were no interferences.

It took me awhile to totally adapt to his approach, my guess close to 5 years or more, I would try this, than that,
in context design where everything worked well till I had to change a part from square to round, or delete a part,
as you can imagine there was a mess to clean up and fix, the time it took was directly related to the placement
of the part, was it the first part or the last part in the feature tree. Now there is no assembly that is done the old
way, it is done the Neil way.. I can delete any part within any assembly and not throw an error (except Mating
Errors), unless I made a mistake, such as picking a vertex of a part where I thought was a vertex of a sketch.

In my part template I have numerous planes and sketches, the base coordinates of every part and assembly is
the point of origin and the 3 main SolidWorks Planes, which I have renamed Front Middle, Floor and Right
Middle.

The entire project is defined in the initial part which has only Sketches & Planes, overall shape and also planes to
extrude up to surface etc., or I use sketch points as well. There are very few part files that have any dimensions
in them, everything is in the first sketch part that I call a Skeleton Sketch:
The Skeleton Sketch part is the first component in every assembly and sub-assembly that is made.

Below is the Main Assembly 176357G-000

Below is the Assembly 176357G-001 expanded (Assemblies 176357G-002 – 003 -004 – 005 & 006 have the same
part as the top part in the assembly.
How does the sketch part look like:
Continued …..
With everything shown:
Double clicking on Boss-Extrude2 or part 176357G-026 produced no dimensions, all the information is in the
176357G-Sketch part…
Did you know you can color your sketches as well –

Thanks to Alin Vargatu to remind me that I can color the sketches which makes it much easier to find a certain
sketch.

Just a couple more notes; You can apply equations and configurations to the sketches, this is the best place for
them, rather than 3 or 4 levels deep.

Rebuilding a large assembly can be a huge challenge, however using the Skeleton Sketch method it drastically
reduces any major rebuild issues. Watch for the traffic light..

Depending on how the part is used I do use depth extrusion inputs rather than choosing sketch points, so you
have that flexibility in the design element.
This particular project has 15 sub-assemblies, and take note that each sub-assembly is fixed, there are no mates
and that is the best part, the sub-assemblies snap into place, because all the parts and subassemblies share the
same origin and are placed in the same position, which I’ll explain a little more in detail below…

Final Product (with Visualize):

CREATING A PART…..
We use a numeric numbering system that starts with style, what it is, (bed, dresser, chair etc..) then the last 3
digits are started at -000, so I like to keep the assemblies in the top area of those numbers, which I would have
liked the designation to be different from assemblies to parts, but all ok..

First step is to figure out roughly how many sub assembles there are, so if I have 5, I open one new assembly,
insert the Skeleton Sketch Part and save it as ……..-000 then I do a save as copy and save the next 4. I close the -
000 assembly, which I keep as the top Main Assembly and then open the -001 assembly, now every assembly
has the Skeleton Sketch part as the first item in the feature tree.

In the ….-001 assembly I insert “New Part” and save it right away as the next number in this example -006 and I
place it in the Front Plane (Every Part is placed the same way), see below….

Pick the part template you want to use…

 Save the File

Insert in the Front Plane of the Assembly

 Exit Sketch (Important Step) After exiting, this sketch doesn’t show in the feature tree.

Choose the plane where the part needs to be developed

NOTE: Before you sketch the part or mate any part – Select the component that you
are working on and the Skeleton Sketch Part and right click and select Isolate – This is
an important step that I was missing for many years – Once you use this step there is
no change of selecting another components vertex…
I either trace a Sketch in the Sketch Part or choose convert entities icon. I have read on the forum it is better to
trace then convert entities.

Now I extrude the part, either up to a plane or a vertex, add additional features till the part is completed, all
sketch planes are selected from the Sketch Part. This step is the most important step of this design process,
because if I start another assembly, in the design process and I see I need to make changes to part ….-008,

I can change the Skeleton Sketch in any of the 5 assemblies or open up the Skeleton Sketch part and make my
changes, then when I open up the assembly where the part was made, it will automatically change.

I treat every Sub-Assembly as a Zone, in the Bookcase project, there was a top, bottom, sides, main cabinet,
doors and shelves.

After each assembly or zone is completed then I open the Main Assembly ….-000 and insert the other sub-
assemblies, so when I go through the insert dialog box I pick every sub-assembly and hit insert, hover over the
point of origin and one by one they drop in place fixed, no mates.

In using the above design process in our case, changes are quick and easy, (if you know the Skeleton Sketch Part
), overall size changes are all in the Floor Plan View sketch and the Top plane, individual part changes are done
using any of the other sketches..

What about interchangeable components? Those I mate within the sub-assembly as needed, so I do have some
mates, but very little.

The nice part about doing it this way in our situation here is, we do a lot of custom modifications and using Pack
& Go, I can have another size in a few minutes..

The biggest challenge for me is the design intent process, looking at a project and visualizing how it needs to be
done and how many subassemblies there needs to be. There is a lot more thought going into a project this way,
but I think it’s actually quicker once you get used to it. It can take me a long time developing the Skeleton
Sketch part, however the rest is very easy and almost monotonous.

Solidworks Work Flow – Custom Properties & Drawings

Designing/Modeling is only half the work in getting the information to manufacturing or to potential clients and
Custom Properties and Drawings have been evolving for my over the last few years. The introduction of Custom
Property Tab Builder had been an awesome boost when it comes to getting the information consistent, easy to
change etc…

I work with multiple tab drawings, (some over a 100 drawing sheet pages), and never want to go back to single
drawing files or drawing file per part. Using that many drawing tabs can slow down the file, however it is still
quicker than opening and closing a 100 files. My drawing setup does have the ability to have individual part or
individual assembly information within the part file, you change one part, the CPTB is also setup to handle up to
3 revisions, so the information is right where it needs to be, with that part or assembly. Any interchangeable
component is listed in the BOM only and there is a drawing in some folder somewhere within the system.

Creating a drawing workflow is a little more difficult doing it the way I use SolidWorks, however again once
learned and finessed to your system, guaranteed it will be quicker in the long run.
Setting up Custom Property Tab Builder (CPTB), is first and foremost to any project. I have well over a 100
custom property fields that can be used, I don’t use nearly all of them, but I have the flexibility to use them
when I need to. Each of the Custom Properties were needed at some time or the other, so I would just keep
them in the CPTB file. Within that CPTB file I have room for 60 notes and most times I might only use 3 or 4 lines
per part, one assembly had over 40 lines of notes, so I just added a few more.
So when I get a project to work on, most times before I start working on anything, I’ll setup the CPTB. Here we
use an ECN and an ECR process so almost all projects are numbered based on the ECN. I open the latest CPTB
file and

Portfolio Snap Shots…