SolidWorks® 2007 Bible

Chapter 11. Editing and Evaluation

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Using Rollback

• Reordering features

• Reordering folders

• Using the Flyout FeatureManager

• Part modeling best practice summary

• Evaluation techniques

• Tutorial: Editing and evaluation techniques

If you work like I do, then you probably create a part once, but edit it many times. As I often say, design for change is really at the core of most of the modeling work that you will do in SolidWorks, and deletion is not an editing option.

You do the most good—or the most harm—in the initial stages of modeling when you are setting up parametric relations between features and sketches. For this reason, editing often quickly turns into repair. Granted, some changes are simply unavoidable, but a thorough knowledge of editing—and repairing—can help you to understand the how, what, and why of modeling best practice.

This chapter starts with some very basic concepts of editing, which you may have picked up if you have been reading this book from the beginning. Because this is the last chapter in Part II, and the last that deals strictly with part modeling, it also contains a summary of part-modeling best practice and a set of model evaluation tools that can help you to evaluate the manufacturability and aesthetic properties of parts. I have included these evaluation tools in a chapter on editing because the edit-evaluate cycle is one of the most familiar in modeling and design practice.

Using Rollback

Rolling back a model simply means looking at the results of ...