A few SolidWorks questions

[fastback33]

I come from the land of Catia, so SW isn't far off being made by the same company but....I cant for the life of me find where my constraints tool bar is? Wtf im in a sketch trying to make two lines parallel to the origin and end up spending an hour looking for probably one of the most used tool bars in catia, yet solid works manages to hide it somewhere...

so, what am i obviously doing wrong?

p.s. i am teaching sw to myself and have no classroom exp. with it.

p.p.s. thanks for the help!

[spacer]

If you select one of your lines, are you able to see the FeatureManager tree? If not, toggle it using F9.

If one sketch element is selected, the featuremanager wil show you the current relations (SW sketch constraints are called relations) for that element. Selecting multiple elements will allow you to add relations.

[fastback33]

Hmmm...
In Catia when you're in a sketch it would allow you to set constraints of lines based on the origin, and reference planes. That's what i'm tyring to do here. I want to be able to set the end points of lines coincident/parallel/perpendicular/etc. with the origin.


Perhaps it was because it was late at night and I was tired so I will check out what you suggested when i have my laptop later tonight!

[fastback33]

Okay, I think ive got it. I still can't get the points at the end of two lines to become coincident though...

Do you have a book you would recommend?

[spacer]

While in sketch-editting you can select the end points of a sketch line and add relations the way I posted above. So select the end points of the two lines you want to constraint and add the relations. Same goes for the origin, you can select the origin as if it were a sketch point.

When moving from Autodesk Inventor to SLD I found many of the build-in tutorials to be quite good. Having previous CAD experience will allow you to skip through most of the tutorials pretty fast, while still learning were all of the functions are located. I'd recommend to take a few hours to read through those (Help -> Solidworks tutorials).

[fastback33]

Back to this again....I hate having all of the tool bars filling up my screen and i know you can put them in the command manager, but i haven't figured out how to do that yet. Any tips on cleaning up my SW workbenches?