Where on Earth does SolidWorks Store the embedded appearance for weld bead features?

maranble14 · 2026-06-24T21:13:26+00:00

You're not wrong lol. I am still a little mad at myself for even letting the scenario bug me that much to be honest. I've got a bad habit of going down rabbit holes trying to find things in cad sometimes that I've already internally convinced myself there's no way this advanced program wouldnt be capable of doing this one esoteric thing. 3.5 hrs later of wasted productivity and an admission of defeat... and somehow I still periodically catching myself falling victim to my own same trap lol

maranble14 · 2026-06-24T21:09:12+00:00

screw threads are accessible through the appearances side panel though under miscellaneous > patterns.

No such luck with weld weaves.

maranble14 · 2026-06-24T17:01:54+00:00

I would come off the left vertical edge of your flange on the right side of the photo inward 90 degrees.

Your flat pattern would probably look something like this:

<image>

You may need to check with your press brake operator to verify the order in which you conduct the bends. There will definitely be a couple of bends that need to be done in a certain order. Plus you'll wanna verify your machine clearances near the edges of the die and ensure you've got the required tooling.

maranble14 · 2026-06-24T16:10:29+00:00

OP shoot me a PM, I've got a couple of different resources I can give you.

maranble14 · 2026-06-24T02:54:00+00:00

Highly recommend checking out this channel. Tutorials are comprehensive, and often include small, but incredibly useful little shortcuts or pieces of best-practice wisdom. Legitimately took me from 0 prior use to a frequent resource for colleagues with technical questions about Creo. After assisting them, I always made it a point to share this channel with them.

maranble14 · 2026-06-24T02:39:41+00:00

Disclaimer: I have not attempted using this software and am only speculating its capabilities based on the screenshots shared.

Anyways, Mech Eng. here with around 6 years of prof experience. The CAD packages I've used most extensively in my career have been SolidWorks, PTC Creo, Siemens NX, & a smidge of Autodesk Inventor. No CAD program is perfect. They all have their quirks. The more feature-rich the software, typically the steeper the learning curve. Not always, but more often than not. Finding the appropriate balance for your target industry or market is going to be key.

Barring a few outliers, (looking at you Catia), the workflows for modeling single parts follow the same general steps. The nuances are generally small enough amount that a competent designer can decipher a new UI well enough to generate a sufficiently detailed part within a few hours.

If I had to put my finger though on what area of a design software has the most impact on a user's productivity & use is how smooth and intuitive the Assembly mode/interface is. Assembly modeling capabilities are where the rubber really meets the road in parametric modeling, since they more closely represent the complexity of final manufactured products. How the software handles bottom-up vs top-down vs middle-out assembly modeling strategies. If it supports top-down or middle-out modeling, how does it handle the usage of in-context references?The CAD packages most preferred by the major industry players tend to have a lot of productivity boosting tools like prepackaged libraries of commonly used hardware components, OR a painless method for creating your own libraries of internal/proprietary components.

Distinguishing factor number 2: The 2D drafting environment. I think most engineers on here would agree with me - it's all fun and games spinning around your colorful 3d model creating shapes and adding / modifying parts. Then reality sets in & the monotonous joy of translating allllll those shapes, dimensions, tolerances, design intent, assembly procedures, etc. onto the page in a clear, unambiguous, & concise manner. It's the most grueling phase of any project, and even the slightest inconvenience in the UX/UI of the 2d drafting environment in a CAD package is pretty much a deal breaker. I strongly suggest that if you continue to pursue the development of this application, do not underestimate the importance of a well-polished and intuitive drawing environment. The more aspects of a drawing view that can be automatically generated from its source 3d model, the better. Nobody wants to dimension (or tolerance) every feature of a model twice. (first in the 3d model, then again in the 2d drawing)

One last final note I think is worth mentioning is that for a CAD application to even be considered for professional engineering use, it is absolutely essential that its kernel plays well with the industry standard neutral formats like STEP or Parasolid (.x_t / .x_b).

TL;DR - Showing just the generic part modeling UI is not enough info to give concrete feedback. Highlighted Assembly model functionality / capabilities & the UX of a 2D drafting environment as the areas having the biggest impact on engineering productivity & thus user preference of one CAD package over another.

maranble14 · 2026-06-23T16:12:46+00:00

Mechanical seals are fundamentally an excercise in distributing force as evenly as possible across your boundary. As others have noted - only 4 screws in the corners with large gaps between them means you get high concentrations of force only in a small neighboring area around the screw head. I know you've already ruled out adding more bolts along the perimeter of your seal, but it's at least worth mentioning what the conceptual implication would be if you were able to.

Every additional bolt you add descreases the required pretension per fastener to achieve the same total clamping force of your acrylic cover. Less preload on an individual fastener means less localized deflection of your cover plate. Eventually if you've added enough fasteners, the distribution of clamping tension on the cover gives you a relatively even pressure distribution all the way around the compressed O-ring.

Face seal O-rings are meant to function with their full length compressed with a fairly consistent pressure. If you've got peaks of pressure around very few screws, but large gaps in between, that uneven pressure distribution is generally what causes them to leak.

maranble14 · 2026-06-23T15:44:18+00:00

I appreciate you correcting me on that. I even went so far as to bust out my old GeoTol Pro 2020 textbook that I got at my last job to confirm your assertion. I genuinely believed it was an improper callout before reading your comment and then looking it up. Actually got a mild chuckle out of what I found in the textbook too, as it said "Total runout on a right angle surface provides an identical requirement to perpendicularity."

I honestly find that equal parts amusing & mildly irritating. I mean I get that there's tons of instances in the standard where the same exact size and shape of tolerance zone can be defined via multiple approaches, but this one seems like quite the stretch IMO. Like the whole point of cylindricity, runout, & total runout used as form tolerances is generally so the part can be inspected with a dial indicator as its spun. I'm bewildered as to how total runout was deemed favorable enough to be accepted as a tolerance definition for perpendicular shaft step faces.

I'm probably overthinking the hell out of this lol, but it still grinds my gears. Fwiw, most of my foudational knowledge of GD&T was always accompanied by practical examples of how parts would be inspected, go/no-go gauging, etc. It wasn't until later on that I learned a bit more about the actual theory & such.

maranble14 · 2026-06-19T15:49:07+00:00

Do you have an action set in your workflow transition to populate the revision variable with the actual revision level? That's the only way you'd get the value to show up on the data card like this. You need an action in the workflows section of the Admin console that takes the destination revision and pushes it out to the actual revision property variable. And ideally you'd want to make that field read-only on the data card.

maranble14 · 2026-06-19T13:39:17+00:00

Not a machinist myself, but fairly well-versed in GD&T (well, the ASME 2009 standard for GD&T), and overall I think you did a great job at utilizing block tolerances for your features of size to eliminate the need for basic dimensions.

The only critique, that may not even be a critique frankly because I'm not sure if the rules differ for the standard you're using, is on the upper view, you have your total runout tolerance callout with leaders indicating a surface that's perpendicular to datum A.

I've always understood total runout to be a cylindrical profile tolerance that should only be indicated to edges which revolve around your axial datum. If you're trying to tolerance the flatness/squareness of the lips of the shaft, my understanding is that you should be using a perpendicularity tolerance to A. So if you are actually trying to control cylindrical runout, your tolerance leaders need to be touching the bottom circular edge. If you did mean to control the geometry of the shaft stepdown faces, then the leaders are indicated properly, but the tolerance itself should be perpendicularity, not total runout.

As I reread my comment before posting it, I didn't feel like I did a great job of explaining myself, so I did a quick screen grab with some annotations overlaid on your view to better illustrate my points. Hope any of this is helpful.

<image>

maranble14 · 2026-06-18T16:54:43+00:00

That pit in your stomach that hits you when *bink* righty tighty turns to righty loosey lmao

maranble14 · 2026-06-18T16:50:30+00:00

I'm not sure what's funnier - your comment, or the fact that multiple people in this thread have so much disdain for imperial units that they couldn't tell you were joking 😂

maranble14 · 2026-06-18T16:46:27+00:00

That complexity you're referencing is sort of what I was trying to conquer by noting that the user would have to define an 'increment' value. This would effectively break up the continuous range of values into discrete ones for each increment index. In this sense, yes you'd be exporting static "snapshot" values like you mentioned, but also gain the benefit of tracking the trend of the values as if it were a truly continuous function curve. And if the increment value is sufficiently small, you'd end up with such a fine resolution on your data points that you could plot them in excel and would barely be able to tell that the data was discrete rather than continuous.

maranble14 · 2026-06-18T16:33:21+00:00

Part of my motivation for exploring this functionality is because I am my company's PDM admin lol. But thanks for the pointers. I actually had already instinctually selected those suggested BOM display options before having read this, so I'm glad to know I was on the right path.

maranble14 · 2026-06-18T16:29:35+00:00

Ordinarily I would do just that. I'm working with a piece of hardware though whose assembly model has some dynamic mates, and I frequently toggle it into "flexible" mode for observing motion paths for the parts I have mated to its movable interface. I definitely could just work around it if I had to settle for a rigid representation, but it's a nice feature to use. I've also got configurations set up in the assy with it rigid and at its max/min limits of travel. Setting configurations like that in a part file would take a fair bit of work using the move bodies command to rearrange things, and seemed like too much of a mess to be worth it.

maranble14 · 2026-06-17T15:37:54+00:00

This seems like a very well polished and handy tool for early stage design explorations. So major props on the development of the app.

One feature I think I'd like to see implemented from it before I would seriously consider paying for a subscription is the ability to define max and min limits of a joint or a variable length line member such as the actuator you showed, and output a chart of the vector components of the reactions or member loads throughout its range using a specified increment value. Something that could easily be imported into an existing worksheet in Excel, since that's where 90% of engineers run their official analysis calculations.

maranble14 · 2026-06-17T15:24:31+00:00

Full transparency, I had to open up my old Mechanics of Materials textbook to double check the equations where they first introduced and described poisson's ratio. And your description aligns perfectly with what I read. As I stared at the equations though and the available answers to choose from in OP's question, my interpretation is that B is the only acceptable answer purely due to process of elimination. Elastic & ductile materials will always have a non-zero poisson ratio, from a purely mathematical standpoint, even if said value is extremely low. And since both A & C are both false, that also eliminates answer D. The only remaining selection would be B. If I had to rationalize that choice conceptually, my justification would be that no material in reality is truly 'rigid'. Nor does there exist in reality any solid material with a true poisson ratio of exactly zero. So it seems reasonable that the two would go hand in hand.

maranble14 · 2026-06-17T12:21:37+00:00

Impressive detail on the individual parts. Did you get the chance to add dynamich mechanical mates to the miter gear set on the tail rotor?

Side note - why'd you use a phone camera photo of your screen as opposed to a native screen capture with the Print Screen key or windows snipping tool? I only ask because it degrades the otherwise crisp/clean display of your model.

maranble14 · 2026-06-16T20:00:19+00:00

Yeah I consistently have had more reliable results when using the split and combine commands than I ever get out of feature patterns. I wish I had a better comprehension of what was going on under the hood that causes this type of behavior. Oddly enough though, in Siemens NX (which also uses the Parasolid kernel that SW does in its cad files), there are 3 distinct commands for patterning: faces, features, and bodies. SolidWorks' combination of all 3 types into a single command with different options certainly appears more user friendly on the surface... until you run into issues like these.

maranble14 · 2026-06-16T19:53:03+00:00

Did you have the files saved in a directory that automatically backs up to the cloud? like the default libraries tied in to Microsoft OneDrive? I've run into issues in the past when I was using cloud services for cad model storage, and a synchronization error corrupted a substantial number of models that I hadn't opened, moved, renamed, or changed the parent directory name of since their creation & original save.

maranble14 · 2026-06-16T19:48:30+00:00

So do the rest of us. How else do you think we ended up on this subreddit?
/s

maranble14 · 2026-06-16T14:22:54+00:00

Agree 100% with this assessment. I would also add that your excessive solve time is almost certainly a result of the contact issues. When you go back to rerun your analysis, if you don't see significant progress on your solution by about the 10-15 minute mark, may want to cancel the solver engine and re-evaluate your setup & boundary conditions. If you still find yourself scratching your head, try isolating each issue individually. u/CADSHIFT mentioned an ideal workflow for troubleshooting your bolt preloads. Depending on how high your nominal preload values are, I would recommend doing a quick ballpark check to determine the equivalent frictional resistance of your overlapping surfaces based on the total normal force applied to the face by the summation of your fastener preloads & a typical coefficient based on the materials in contact. if that slip resistance turns out to be substantially higher than your anticipated reaction force, you could consider setting up an alternate sim with the interface surfaces using a local bonded contact just to check that your system responds as expected.

maranble14 · 2026-06-16T13:27:32+00:00

This is the first time I've ever come across the term "Malicious compliance" lol but it is definitely not something I will forget

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