MASWUG Meeting Review

Last night I attended the MASWUG (Madison Area SolidWorks Users Group) meeting.  The presenter was the well known and appreciated Ed Eaton of the DiMonte Group out of Arora, IL.  He did his presentation on Lofts that he will present at SolidWorks World in 3 weeks.  He’s still refining the details, but I was impressed.  As always, his presentation will be posted on the DiMonte Group web page sometime after SolidWorks World w/ DVD extras.

If you used lofts, you have had problems with lofts.  He talked about the common problems.  Why lofted sheet metal parts sometimes won’t unbend, how to get your parts to have nicer blends between their surfaces, why two surfaces that appear to be the same, but have a line between them and how to get rid of that line. 

When you don’t use lofts often it’s hard to remember what all the options are for and when you should use them.  On top of that the wording that SolidWorks uses is not easy to understand.  Ed talked spent a good amount of time talking about the functionality and more importantly why things work the way they do.  He coved are the difference between using surfaces and solids lofts, end constraints, centerline parameters, when you should use guide curves, when a sweep be more appropriate and more.

This was a great presentation and I recommend checking it out.