Continue to Site

Eng-Tips is the largest engineering community on the Internet

Intelligent Work Forums for Engineering Professionals

  • Congratulations cowski on being selected by the Eng-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

SolidWorks Drawing

Status
Not open for further replies.

goodlook

Mechanical
Jun 6, 2003
24
I am new to Solid works and need some guidance in following issues:

1. I am unable to pick the hidden lines to give dimensions. (For example hidden lines of a hole shown in side view.)

2. When smart dimension is clicked, the mouse point doesn't change to line or point to pick the first and second points for dimension.

3. How it is possible to dimension from line to tangent point of an arc or circle? Is there a toggle option to do this?

Is there any parameter settings to make all these work?

Thanks
 
Replies continue below

Recommended for you

1. Tools->Options, System Options tab, Display/Selection category - change options for selecting hidden entities.

2. Check your selection filters

3. Yes. Hold "Shift" when clicking circle in the area of the tangent point.

-handleman, CSWP (The new, easy test)
 
Just for reference, most would not approve of a print with dimensions to a hidden feature. You might consider a partial section and dimentioning to the hole centerline.

My 2 cents....

Harold
SW2008 SP3.0 OPW2008 SP0.1 Win XP Pro 2002 SP2
Dell 690, Xeon 5160 @3.00GHz, 3.25GB RAM
nVidia Quadro FX4600
 
Harold is right. It is bad practice (and a bit confusing) to dimension to hidden lines. You can use a partion section, or just simply use Break-Out within the view (recommended for hole depths).

This may be more an issue of drafting experience than CAD itself.

Matt Lorono
CAD Engineer/ECN Analyst
Silicon Valley, CA
Lorono's SolidWorks Resources
Co-moderator of Solidworks Yahoo! Group
and Mechnical.Engineering Yahoo! Group
 
goodlook,

The others have made good points about drafting practices. I also suspect since you are new to SolidWorks that you are manually dimensioning your drawing rather than importing the dimensions from the part files. On a new drawing with your views in place click Insert, Model Items, then hit the check mark and the the Yes button. This will take all the dimensions used to define the part and put them on the drawing. From here you mostly have to reposition the dimensions. You can delete those you don't need with no harm to the part file. Generally you have very few dimensions that you will need to add manually.

If this is of value to you then you really should go through ALL the SolidWorks tutorials, especially the ones related to drawings.

- - -Updraft
 
The tutorials in the SW help section should be your starting point. Some training from you VAR would be the next most useful (albeit expensive) step.

Here are some demos which may be useful.

The Online Tutorials section in
The most popular/well known online tutorials are from and Both are very good.

[cheers]
 
Thanks to everyone for your comments.
bigsmile.gif
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor