SolidWorks® 2011 Parts Bible

CHAPTER 12

Editing, Evaluating, and Troubleshooting

IN THIS CHAPTER

Using Rollback to look at the results of the design tree

Reordering features in the design tree

Reordering all features as a folder

Selecting items using the Flyout FeatureManager

Summarizing best practice suggestions for modeling parts

Applying evaluation techniques to plastic parts and complex shapes

Diagnosing errors

Editing and evaluation techniques tutorial

When you use CAD programs, you typically create a part once but edit it many times. Design for change is at the core of most of the modeling work that you will do in SolidWorks, and deletion is not an editing option.

The initial stages of modeling are the most crucial. This is when you set up parametric relations between the features and sketches that form the foundation for an assembly or complex part. For this reason, editing often quickly turns into repair. Granted, some changes are simply unavoidable, but a thorough knowledge of editing — and repairing — can help you to understand the how, what, and why of modeling best practice.

This chapter starts with some very basic concepts of editing, which you may have picked up if you have been reading this book from the beginning. It also contains a summary of part modeling best practice techniques and a set of model evaluation tools that can help you evaluate the manufacturability and aesthetic properties of parts. I have included these evaluation tools in a chapter on editing because the create-evaluate-edit-evaluate ...