After I wrote Top Assembly Features SOLIDWORKS Users Cannot Live Without, I found even more assembly techniques. I hope you like them.
Assembly Tip 8: Alt to Hide Faces
For: Quickly and easily mating components
While you’re active in the mate command in SOLIDWORKS, you can press the Alt key while hovering over a face to hide it so that you can click the geometry behind it. This saves you from having to rotate your model around to find geometry that is obscured by faces. Keep in mind that this only works when you’re actively using the mate command.
Assembly Tip 9: Select Other
For: Quickly and easily selecting hard-to-reach parts or features
If you’re like most power users, you typically don’t add mates when using the mate command. That’s too slow. You know you can add quick mates by just selecting the entities in the graphics area and adding mates by using the quick mate toolbar that appears like magic next to your cursor. Use the select other command to help pick geometry that might be hard to reach or difficult to select. To launch this command, right-click on top of or near the geometry you want to select. Now you can pick the geometry in the graphics area or from a list that is presented. This is useful for assemblies but not exclusive to them. It can be used for parts, too.
Assembly Tip 10: View Selector(Added to SOLIDWORKS 2013)
For: Easily navigating the model views
There are many ways to navigate around your assemblies. The view selector is my favorite. It’s a tool that presents the different views in a context that allows you to easily navigate around the geometry by picking views on a cube. It has its own command in the orientation dialog box, or you can use the hot key Control + Space. This is incredibly useful when the standard views don’t line up. You know how frustratingly common this is. Use the view selector to save yourself some frustration and navigate around any model with ease.
Assembly Tip 11: Save Section View
For: Easily working with section views
Over the years, the section view tool has gone from simple and basic to complex and incredibly powerful —planar, zonal, excluded, included—there’s a lot of functionality to help you visualize your assemblies. When you get things just right, you can save the section view so that you can easily come back to it later and even add it to your 2D drawings. The option is at the bottom of the Section View Property Manager.
Assembly Tip 12: Component Preview(Added to SOLIDWORKS 2016)
For: Easily working with assembly components
Component Preview is like having a picture in a picture for your assemblies. It opens up a new window with a component in it so that you can take a closer look without all the other components. It’s a great way to measure components or even add mates.
Pro Tip: Click the Synchronize button to synchronize the Model View between the assembly and the preview.
Assembly Tip 13: Primary Planes(Added to SOLIDWORKS 2016)
For: Easily working with model planes
The more you use SOLIDWORKS, the more you realize how incredibly useful the primary (default front, top, and right) planes are. Here’s one button to turn them on in your assemblies so you can get instant access to them for measurements, mates, or modeling in context.
Assembly Tip 14: Add Planes
For: Quickly adding planes
The primary planes are useful, but there are only three of them. If you need to add more—and you will—here are my two favorite ways to add planes. Both methods are quick because they work by first selecting things in the graphics and not starting within the Reference Geometry menu.
First, to add a parallel plane, hover over an existing plane in the graphics area and hold the control key to drag a new plane from the existing one. The offset distance is defined by how far away from the plane you drag.
Second, to add a midplane, you just preselect two parallel faces and click the plane button. A midplane will be added between these two faces.
Assembly Tip 15: Width Mate
For: Quickly centering components
When putting things together, I’ve found that lining components up by centering them is incredibly common. The Width Mate is the best way to do this and here’s the quickest way to execute this command. Preselect the faces that define the components you want to align and then from the context menu, click the button for Width Mate. This works for selecting two faces from square components or selecting one face from a cylindrical component.
If there is a common theme to this list, it’s ease of use and saving time. Does this mean you can’t use SOLIDWORKS if you don’t know them? No, of course not. There are so many ways to get the job done in SOLIDWORKS and that’s what makes it such a great tool. Is there a right way? I’ve always said the right way is the way that gets the job done. Is there a best way? That’s the way that gets it done the quickest.
With these tools, tips, and tricks, I hope you can get the job done quicker. They’re the top things I don’t want you to live without. Have I missed any?