Evan Yares
New member
SolidWorks is good. Really good, most of the time. But can it handle really interesting machine design problems?
Consider this device:
Here is a video of it.
Believe it or not, it's a corkscrew. A rather Rube Goldbergesque corkscrew, with lots of interesting parts and mechanisms.
If you had to model this machine (with all its kinematics) in SolidWorks, how hard would it be? What parts of it would be challenging? Where would you need to come up with workarounds? Where would SolidWorks kick-butt compared to other CAD programs? And how much of the success in doing it would be up to the skill of the user? (That is, would you really need to be a SolidWorks expert to do it right?)
Consider this device:

Here is a video of it.
Believe it or not, it's a corkscrew. A rather Rube Goldbergesque corkscrew, with lots of interesting parts and mechanisms.
If you had to model this machine (with all its kinematics) in SolidWorks, how hard would it be? What parts of it would be challenging? Where would you need to come up with workarounds? Where would SolidWorks kick-butt compared to other CAD programs? And how much of the success in doing it would be up to the skill of the user? (That is, would you really need to be a SolidWorks expert to do it right?)