Seconds turn into minutes, minutes into hours, and hours into days......you get the idea. In the mechanical design & drafting world, just like most other professions, time is money. Anything you can do to cut down time spent doing superfluous tasks will drastically increase productivity (isn't that the point!) As a designer/drafter, our days are spent in the drawing world creating manufacturing prints of our creations. Drawings are still king (check out Siemen's whitepaper

Every product on the market always starts with one thing in common---a problem in need of a solution. Yesterday I had a problem that I was in dire need of a solution. A little bit of background on myself lately; I have been going to the gym trying to lose a few lbs (down 18 lbs in two months), as being a drafter seems to make you fat from sitting all day. It was suggested that I start taking creatine supplement to boost my muscle gain, so I went to the store to pick some u

Over the vast 8 years that I have had in the drafting and design industry, I have noticed how my processes and practices have changed. I can remember back to high school and college drafting classes; getting assigned a part to 3D model from a 2D multi-view drawing and rolling with it. I would start with a part file, model the part, make drawing of said part, put said part into an assembly, make drawing of assembly, so on and so forth. For you out there that was as naive as

It's been a few weeks since I brought something to the table. We have all heard the mantra "time is money". In 3D modeling and design, this could not be more true. Yesterday, I was working on a model, and used a feature that I am very familiar with, but one that many Solid Edge Users may not be aware of---the "Capture Fit" feature. This little trinket can save vast amounts of time when putting together assemblies; I have found it's most effective use is with fasteners. S

When I switched to Solid Edge as my main program for SLDD, I ran into one small problem---part families; I did not know how to do them in Solid Edge. Part families are parts that share similar characteristics, but certain geometries may change (like length of a bolt). All of that data can be stored in one part. In a world where Solid Works is king when it comes to configurations (SolidWorks' lingo for part families), I had to figure out how Solid Edge performed a task that