A Knowledgebase for all Die Designers…

A great and often used System Option in SolidWorks is found under Display/Selection and is called “Enable selection through transparency”. If you have a model that is transparent, or actually semi-transparent (we encourage you to take advantage of transparency when using Logopress3) you will notice that if this option is checked under System Options, you will be able to click “through” things as if they weren’t there in the way. This allows you to select things that are behind others without switching your display to Hidden Lines Visible or Wireframe mode.

But this can be a pain to toggle on and off all the time. So two things:

1. Did you know that, because this is such an important option when designing with transparency that this is the one and only command on a Logopress3 toolbar or Command Manager that is not actually a Logopress3 command, but is simply a SolidWorks toggle? We put it there for your convenience. The icon for it looks like an isometric transparent box and is found about in the middle o f both the part and the assembly Logopress3 Command Manager tabs as well as in the middle of the Logopress3 Filter toolbar.
2. Now here’s the really interesting one that will benefit both Logopress3 users and non-users alike if you use transparency: To quickly override the selection through transparency option, simply hold down the Shift key as you make your selection. Note that this option works both ways, to override when on and override when off. So if you have it off/unchecked but you find you want to select through something, holding the Shift key down will allow you to. If you have it on/checked, you will be able to select the nearest thing to you as opposed to selecting through the model.

LP3 tips & tricks, SolidWorks tips & tricks

We’ve been using SSDs (Solid State Drives) instead of HDDs (Hard Disk Drives) for a couple of years now. Our most productive customers have also been using them for years. The difference in performance is quite dramatic. For years we promoted high end Western Digital Raptors and later VelociRaptor traditional platter drives in a Raid 0 array. No longer.

Today I am completely convinced that SSDs are definitely worth the extra money and the extra risk. That’s right, I said extra risk. While manufacturers of these devices would have you believe that since there are no moving parts, the failure rate is much lower than that of traditional platter HDDs. But that is simply not the case. Some brands are notably much more dependable than others. The good news is that when a SSD goes bad it usually goes bad within weeks of installation, and sometimes they are DOA (dead on arrival).

For those of you that I haven’t scared off yet, I can assure you that if you are looking at the bottom line and recognize that time is money, SSDs are very worthwhile, especially to the SolidWorks user. Boot times are dramatically quicker, as are file open times, save times, application load times, and the list goes on. Like any computer hardware, the quality and the brand is very important. It is important than you recognize that all SSDs are not created equal. OCZ drives have been historically bad, even though some magazine reviews give them rave reviews. I am convinced after all my reading and after owning a couple of them that they may be the worst – but there is no way I would have exchanged my experiences with them over the last couple years for platter drives.

I think that SSDs are very much like a front wheel drive car in Wisconsin. Once you’ve experienced driving in snow and ice with a front wheel drive car, you’d never consider going back to a rear wheel drive car. SSDs are the same and this is why, just as front wheel drives did, they are getting more and more popular as time goes on. Prices for the drives fall at a rate of about 50% per year. At the same time, performance is practically doubling every year. I’d encourage you to do some research and order your next computer with one, or, like I do, replace your existing drives with SSDs. There are drives with data transfer kits available that make the transition quite simple. For my money, at this point in time, the Crucial M4 drives are the SSD of choice. I’ll be ordering 4 of them for our training computers in the next few days and also a 512 GB SSD to replace my current 200 GB SSD in my laptop.

In all of our new computer recommendations to our customers, we recommend a high quality SSD drive for the boot drive in addition to a good platter drive for storage purposes. The platter drive can also be used for a backing up, but of course remember that an offsite backup is always important and always will be. (Of course “offsite” could mean “the cloud”.) Besides the benefit of significant speed increases in file related operations, you will have a cooler running computer as well as a completely quiet one from the drive standpoint. I definitely don’t miss the noise of a platter HDD spinning or the extra time spent waiting around for things to load and open and save…

Computer performance

Thanks very much to Todd from Penn United Technologies for showing me this great tip. I am always amazed when I learn something that seems like I should have known it years before!

When editing an assembly for whatever reason, and when the flyout FeatureManager becomes active, it has always been very difficult to see or try to select anything from within this flyout FeatureManager tree as evidenced in the picture below.

To do so, I’ve always manipulated my model away from the flyout FeatureManager so that I could see it better. Todd pointed out the fact that there was a SolidWorks system option that you could uncheck so that the flyout FeatureManager tree was not transparent as you can see in the picture below!

This option can be found here. Again, it is checked by default, you just need to uncheck it and that’s it!

SolidWorks tips & tricks

As a reminder for Logopress3 users, the “Reference part” is the part that you are designing the die for. It is what the strip and the tool revolve around, so to speak, and it is the one part file in the strip and tool that does not get a project number. The “Annex part” is the part whose name always ends with “_for_strip”.

The steps to rename a “Reference part” in Logopress3 are very similar to those found in the previous post called “Create a new tool from a previously created tool“.

1. Open the strip assembly
2. Open the reference part
3. Rename the reference part to the new name using the SolidWorks “Save As…” command. When you do this, do NOT check the “Save as copy” option. (If, when using this “Save As… ” command, you get a SolidWorks dialog box that pops up with a warning about the “Save As” command and replacing references, click OK. Optionally, if you are a more advanced user and you understand what this dialog box is telling you, you can check the box that says “Don’t ask me again”)
4. With this newly named (via the Save As command) reference part open, press CTRL+Q to force a rebuild. This will create new body files with new names referencing this new reference part name
5. Open the annex part that is in the strip assembly and rename it using the SolidWorks “Save As…” command (again, do NOT check the “Save as copy” option) being careful to note that the project name/number should not change
6. With this newly named annex part open, edit the first feature in the tree , that is the Logopress3 “Import” feature and browse to select the newly named reference part name, then check okay to validate
7. While in either the annex part or the strip assembly,  on the Logopress3 pull down menu, select “Update the stations of the Annex part used in the strip“
8. For the sake of housekeeping, I suggest you navigate to the folder containing the old parts that are now unused in this new project and delete these old parts – the old reference part, old annex part and old body files. That’s it, you’re done!

-IMPORTANT- less often used info for LP3 users

Of course one of the most powerful things about CAD has always been the ability to reuse data. Logopress3 has a very powerful command called “Save as… with new project name“.

First of all, note that when you start a new tool in Logopress3, it includes the ability to create a “project name” for this new tool. In doing so it automatically includes this project name in all parts that get inserted into the tool so you don’t have to worry about problems with commonly named parts. Avoiding commonly named parts is an important consideration when working with any parametric software. This automatic project naming is a great feature and a major time saver. It also eliminates a lot of headaches that can occur when doing something like this manually in SolidWorks, or worse yet, when not doing it at all.

This Logopress3 “Save as… with new project name“command could be used right after finishing a design if the next design will be very similar, or it could be used months or years after you’ve finished a design. Perhaps you receive a new order for a die that is very similar to one you’ve done in the past. So, with your old tool open you simply do a “Save as… with new project name” (found under the Logopress3 pull down menu) and Logopress3 will create a completely new set of files that is identical to the previous set (including drawings) other than the new project name of course. It will, of course, break all references to the original project. This is done in a matter of seconds – depending of course on hard drive speed and the size of the tool.

After using this command, you typically have two different methods for working with the newly saved/created project.

1. If there is a relatively big difference between the old part that was in the previous project and the new part that will be in this newly created project, you would use this first method. - You would delete all strip related items that are in the tool, starting with the punch mounting hardware, then the mounted punches themselves – usually by using the Logopress3 “Delete punch” function, and then any cavities that have been cut for said punches (this happens automatically when using the Logopress3 “Delete punch” function), and ultimately deleting the strip assembly itself, including the part that the die was originally created to make. You would then create and insert a completely new strip into this tool that was newly created tool.
2. This second method would get used if there was a relatively small change being made to the part that the new die is getting created for.You can keep the existing  strip and rename the part so that it is now named with the new part name/number. This method maximizes the reuse of data benefit.

The rest of this post will focus on the specific instructions for using the second method. Please follow these steps carefully. As a reminder, the “Reference part” is the part that you are designing the die for. It is what the strip and the tool revolve around, so to speak, and it is the one part in the strip and tool that does not get a project number. The “Annex part” is the part whose name always ends with “_for_strip”.

1. Open the strip assembly that contains the new project number
2. Open the old reference part (note that the reference part (the part that the die will be making) is the one part in the tool that does not get a project number)
3. Rename the reference part to the new name using the SolidWorks “Save As…” command. When you do this, do NOT check the “Save as copy” option. (If, when using this “Save As… ” command, you get a SolidWorks dialog box that pops up with a warning about the “Save As” command and replacing references, click OK. Optionally, if you are a more advanced user and you understand what this dialog box is telling you, you can check the box that says “Don’t ask me again”)
4. With this newly named (via the Save As command) reference part open, press CTRL+Q to force a rebuild. This will create new body files with new names referencing this new reference part name
5. Open the annex part that is in the strip assembly and rename it using the SolidWorks “Save As…” command (again, do NOT check the “Save as copy” option) being careful to note that the project name/number should not change
6. With this newly named annex part open, edit the first feature in the tree , that is the Logopress3 “Import” feature and browse to select the newly named reference part name, then check okay to validate
7. While in either the annex part or the strip assembly,  on the Logopress3 pull down menu, select “Update the stations of the Annex part used in the strip“
8. For the sake of housekeeping, I suggest you navigate to the folder containing the old parts that are now unused in this new project and delete these old parts – the old reference part, old annex part and old body files
9. Now you are free to make changes to the new reference part as needed to reflect the difference between this new part name/number and the old one. Don’t forget to press CTRL+Q to rebuild the body files and after doing so of course, you will need to use the “Update the stations of the Annex part used in the strip” command again.

-IMPORTANT- less often used info for LP3 users