Alignex Blog

Learn how to check for clearance failures between your assembly's components or faces with the Clearance Verification tool. By specifying the minimum acceptable clearance around your components you can pinpoint areas in your assembly that may require extra attention.

Learn how to find problems and errors in your product definitions or assemblies with the Interference Detection tool. It helps you easily see where two parts interfere with each other, and even highlights issues throughout an assembly’s range of motion.

Your best SOLIDWORKS resource is just a click away.

So, you’re using SOLIDWORKS but not taking advantage of MySolidWorks? If so, you’re really missing out on one of the best free resources that SOLIDWORKS has to offer. From free training and online storage to easy access to a full manufacturers network and comprehensive user forum, MySolidWorks can really become one of a designer’s best tools.

At SOLIDWORKS World 2016 last month, the SOLIDWORKS Education team launched a new way get kids interested in STEM - SOLIDWORKS Apps for Kids.

Sometimes a really great feature (no pun intended) gets lost in the shuffle of hundreds of new things that come out every year, thanks to the hard work of the good folks at SOLIDWORKS. FilletXpert is one of those gems that long time SOLIDWORKS users may have never even known about.   FilletXpert in SOLIDWORKS is just one part of a larger idea called “SWIFT” (SOLIDWORKS Intelligent Feature Technology). Other parts of SWIFT are DraftXpert, SketchXpert, & MateXpert (if any of you reading this would like an intro to those capabilities, please leave a note in the comments section and we will consider doing a future post on them as well).

Save time with an easy to create personalized SOLIDWORKS interface.

Much of our design time is composed of a multitude of picks and clicks, but what if we could cut that number of clicks with the same desired outcome? Personalizing your SOLIDWORKS interface to more closely mirror your typical daily design actions is a great way to accomplish this. By switching from normal command prompts and tool bars to more personalized "S" key and mouse gestures you can easily save yourself 35 percent, or even more, of your time.

Since the release of SOLIDWORKS 2016, there have been a lot of questions surrounding hardware requirements, optimal RAM, video cards and more. To ensure you are always working with a SOLIDWORKS supported and optimized system, use these tips from the Alignex technical staff. Though these recommendations are a good starting point for spec’ing out a SOLIDWORKS machine, it is always a good idea to conduct your own hardware/software tests before purchasing any workstation, computer hardware or video card for SOLIDWORKS.

As 2015 comes to a close, we would like to thank you for a great year! We hope you’ve enjoyed reading and have picked up a few tricks along the way. Here are six of our best blog posts from 2015:

With the recent release of SOLIDWORKS 2016 there have been some really nice enhancements in the Assembly Mates arena. Some of these new enhancements are crowd pleasers and are sure to increase productivity for any user. Veteran users included.

The very first and probably the most productive one is when you are in the Mate command. The very first click you do on a face of a component turns that component transparent. This allows immediate visual and selection access to another component that was ‘underneath’ or ‘inside’ of it.

After spending a lot of time on a sheet metal model, we often like additional details to be shown in our DXF export. The same steps we cover here can be applied to DWG files and non-sheet metal parts as well.

In this post we will be manipulating our options to create separate layers for various items in our DXF file. This will enable the end user to turn on/off various layers in their 2D program and get a clearer picture of the final design. Let’s begin!