“Out of date” Alert: There is no discussion in this presentation about working through rebuild errors (or possibly introducing design-intent issues) via any of the ‘Xpert’ functions introduced in SolidWorks 2007. Also, some of the glitches explored in the presentation are version specific – that is why it is so important to test everything in any presentation or online tutorial that you see.
Inspiration: In my observations of coworkers and clients, the single issue that caused the greatest loss in productivity was rebuild errors.
Users would make a change in their model or assembly that caused rebuild errors and they would become apoplectic – instead of calmly going about the business of fixing their models, they would spend inordinate amounts of time complaining about how their parts ‘blew up’, freeze and not do anything, respond in a way that exasperated the problem, or (worst case) ditch changes necessary to the improvement of their designs because those changes caused errors.
Rebuild errors are the price of doing SolidWorks design. We need to adopt techniques to get through them quickly and painlessly, and embrace those errors as a useful check for identifying issues where design intent might be compromised by design changes.
I never wanted to do a presentation about handling rebuild errors because each one of these presentations takes well over 100 hours to compose, format, and test, test, test. Unfortunately for me, no one else stepped up (regardless of the lobbying and attempted recruiting on my part). Even the training material is pretty lean about the topic, though it is in my experience the biggest, most common productivity issue run into by SolidWorks users.
So I did it because I knew it needed to be done. If nothing else, the clear, proven techniques for how to delete a feature without losing any of child features is worth the time to look at it. And I hope anyone who reads this will learn that rebuild errors are not a big deal, and can hopefully stop spending their time griping about how their model ‘blew up’ or ‘errored out’ and instead spend that ‘griping time’ calmly fixing things and getting back to their design work. Its really easy and won’t raise your blood pressure a tic if you know what you are doing.
Abstract: We have all been there : we make a necessary change to a design, and the feature tree “blows-up” with rebuild errors. This session covers how to quickly and painlessly repair rebuild errors in part models by understanding why they happen and discusses tips, tricks, and techniques to repair them fast without ever having to delete and recreate anything. The discussion also highlights proven modeling and mating/assembly structure habits that prevent rebuild errors in the first place.
Benefit: Attendees will leave this session armed with the best practices that will minimize their exposure to rebuild errors, and some great tips and techniques that will allow them to quickly and painlessly repair their SolidWorks files and get back in action. Most importantly, the will learn to calm down when their feature trees erupt in blood – they will learn that most errors can be fixed in seconds (when one knows how) so they can fix their models and get back to their job of designing products.
SWW2005_TreesOfBlood (13MB)
Contents: Powerpoint presentation and working SolidWorks files
