How to create Effective Technical Documentation and Improve ROI using SOLIDWORKS COMPOSER

Objective

Clearly explain and present your product or process using 2D and 3D graphical content that you can quickly create with SOLIDWORKS Composer software.

Traditional Challenges in Consumer Product Industry

• Content creators are often working with different, cobbled together tools, including 2D CAD drawings, digital photography, and file translators.
• Bottleneck to business growth and competitiveness
• Too many manual steps to get to a finished document, and far too much back-and-forth activity.
• Spend too much of time in Manual changes in product as well as technical communication documents
• The whole process is therefore inefficient, slow, and disruptive to the Engineering Department and to the organization as a whole.

Intelligent Solutions for common pitfalls

1.Concurrent technical documentation

• Automate your technical communication process, and make it concurrent with the design process

2.Design, Document, Deliver Easily

• You can dramatically improve the quality, quantity, effectiveness, and customer appeal of your technical communication materials.
• Automatically generating current Bills of Materials (BOMs) with the push of a button, for inclusion in proposals or assembly instructions.

3.Business benefits abound

• Faster time to market. You can create documentation in parallel with product design and development, so products get to market faster.

4.Speed product success

• Engineers can spend more time designing and more easily create technical documents to communicate their work.
• Content creators can spend more time creating great content and less time chasing and updating data.

5.Automating manufacturing and assembly instructions

Summary

• As manufacturing organizations strive to identify ways to,

• save time
• cut costs and
• improve their competitiveness in global markets

• Your company can realize shorter times-to-market, improved operational efficiencies, and good quality documentation.

• More cost savings and also realize significant ROI within the first year.

• Manufacturers can improve profit margins, achieve faster times-to-market, and increase sales related to better customer education

 

Creating Sketch Offsets on 3D Geometry Surfaces

You can use the Offset on Surface tool to offset 3D model edges as well as faces in a 3D sketch. Selecting a single edge will offset that edge. Multiple edge selections will offset the complete chain. You can adjust the offset using the dialogue box or just enter a value. At surface intersections, we can even flip the offset curve to the other side gives you a great flexibility in design. 

We need to reduce some weight of this part and to simplify the complex surface, so let’s see how SOLIDWORKS 2017 can help us. It is now possible to offset curves on any surface. Previously, you had to create extra features for offsetting an edge. 

To create sketch offsets on 3D geometry surfaces:

 1. Open the part model. 

2. Click Offset on Surface(Sketch toolbar) or Tools > Sketch Tools > Offset on Surface.

3. In the graphics area, select the edge as shown.

4. In the Property Manager:

        a) Specify the value of Offset Distance. 

        b) Select Reverse.

            The entity is projected on the opposite face. 

Note: 

       You can only use Reverse when the selected edge is connected to faces that belong to the same body.

5. Select the interior edges as shown. 

6. Click ok.

7. Double-click the dimension and specify value of offset.

If you select a whole surface then SOLIDWORKS offsets all outer edges [Very powerful]. You can use this 3D sketch as a trim tool to cut out the centre of the surface for optimization/ material reduction of the part. 

8. Click Offset on Surface. 

9. In the Property Manager: 

       a) Click face of Surface in the graphics area.  

       b) Specify the value of Offset Distance.
       c) Click ok. 

10. All the edges of surface are offseted now. 

So a powerful new features in SOLIDWORKS 2017 that helps the user to overcome the barriers to create a great looking products. 

Benefits: 

1. Quick wrapping of entities on surface. 
2. Easy creation of offset entities as 3D sketch from our existing surface. 
3. Offseted entities were used for development through fill tool. 
4. Very useful in material saving and mass reduction.