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Any die designers using Solidworks?

J

Jimmer12

Aluminum
Joined
Oct 22, 2012
Location
Ontario, Canada
I came from a background in design in various industries most recently injection moulds. I am now starting a new job in a die shop and the owners are looking to buy either Solidworks or UG. I have probably spent 8000 or more hours on Solidworks and just a few hundred hours doing some 2d detailing in UG so obviously I am pushing for SW. However I keep being told that UG blows SW away especially for die design.

I'd love to hear from anyone that uses SW for die design.

Thanks
Jim
 
I've not used UG, but I have a ton of seat time with Catia. Depends on the complexity of your stuff, but a lot of die (injection, stamping, etc) is modeled with surfaces. Catia, and I imagine UG, are going to be much much better at surface design. Solidworks has surfaces, but it is not a strong area.

Solidworks surfaces work in a top down environment where each feature like a curve or intersection, or even a surface is consumed by the next operation. Basically, in solidworks, each feature can have only one (basically) child feature.

Catia is exactly opposite in the surface module. Features can have infinite numbers of children. This makes it possible to do some crazy complicated modeling. The very first feature you made in the model could be the parent of the very last feature.

The surface module is an added cost in Catia, and the base software is pretty spendy. Solidworks will no doubt be cheaper.
 
I design progressive tools in SW. I think there are specific tools in UG/NX (and SW) that can help with die design. That being said I don't use any of them. I could see where complex mold design might be easier with better surfacing tools. I have no troubles designing dies in SW, once you get the history tree gremlins tamed it's pretty straight forward.

A lot of my dies are smaller components, most of my dies are under 1500lbs complete, running in 200 ton high speed presses. We have done some larger stuff, duct work etc, those were surface intensive and they were a pain, but that may be due to my skill( or lack there of) not SW.

I think SW can do pretty much the same tasks, some are easier than others. With 8K hours I would think that YOU would be productive far faster in SW than NX. Plus NX is significantly more expensive. There is no doubt that the high end systems like NX and Catia are more capable overall, there is a reason SW is considered a mid range product. If you are banging out a new complex progressive or compound die every week it might be worth learning a new system.
 
See thats what I'm thinking. If I have to start with a new software I am at stage one again. With Solidworks I have a really solid base to get started. The die shop I just left used UG but the ironic part was they said the die design wizards that UG sells are useless and they cancelled their subscription for the die design module and just model everything from scratch.
 
Dan B said:
Doesn't Vero have a solution for die design?

Hang on...

Yeah, here it is:

VISI | CAD CAM software for 5 axis machining, 3D milling, mould & die manufacturing
Click to expand...

Not used Visi for die work, but have the full CAD and CAM seat and wouldn't recommend it anyone. The CAM system is a pain to work with and the CAD side isn't a patch on Solidworks. There is no feature tree, so once you create a feature you just simply can't go to the feature tree and edit it, which when used to working with a feature tree is a pain in the chuff.

Some of my work is punch and forging die stuff. Used catia for 5 years + before our company changed to Solidworks. Still have a seat of Catia though and am trying to force myself not to use it. Still prefer Catia, but Solidoworks is pretty good. There's nothing really that I have come across that I could do in Catia that I can't in Solidworks, there's always been a work around to get the end result. As has been mentioned surfacing isn't as polished and somethings don't work as well in SW but then there's a few features in SW that I can't do in Catia that really suit some of our components. Design tables is one of those. Saved me quite a bit of work recently.

If cost wasn't an issue would always recommend Catia, but can't knock SW for the cost.
 
I agree SW is pretty capable of most things, for the money it can't be beat. The value is in SW. I design pretty much everything from scratch, bottom up starting with the progressive strip layout. I have developed a library of common components but nothing fancy. I do a lot of design directly in assembly mode, and use configurations a lot to show dies open and closed with proper stroke and shut height.

I have been wanting to play with an add-in like logopress, just to see if it can automate tasks like flat blank development and strip layout.

SW works pretty well for us, design, machine, even things like overall weight of completed dies or components. I'm not an expert so I'm sure there are other ways we could be using SW, I guess I assume that 5x the cost would mean that a high end system will be 5x better......maybe that isn't the case?
 
I never found anything I couldnt do in Solidworks when I was doing mould design. I did all my moulds as top down designs (in the master assembly) and never had any issues. I think surfacing is really the only thing that I could see being slightly lacking in SW. I think I am going to push for SW at the new job I dont feel like throwing away 7 or 8 years of Solidworks use to start over with something new.
 
You could always add Rhino to take care of the surfacing, then import that back into your mould design in Solidworks. Rhino is not very expensive and does a great job with surfaces.

Dan
 
Dan B said:
You could always add Rhino to take care of the surfacing, then import that back into your mould design in Solidworks. Rhino is not very expensive and does a great job with surfaces.

Dan
Click to expand...

Dan,

New add-in for SW Surfacing: Power Surfacing for SolidWorks® Overview

and here is what someone has done with it. https://forum.solidworks.com/commun...dworks-doent-do-trains-planes-and-automobiles

and here is a comment from another using it:

Kevin Quigley Jan 10, 2013 2:07 PM


Mark, we salute you!!


2500 features? Mouth hits floor....


I have been using Power Surfacing recently and I wonder how many features that would take :-)

I have to say that using that plug in makes surfacing in SolidWorks fun again. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone doing ergonomic/organic forms. As far as I am concerned it is a game changer. As I said on Twitter the other day, this add on is a sales driver to SolidWorks. We no longer have to buy Rhino/ Tsplines/ Modo etc. we buy SolidWorks and Power Surfacing.
 
len_1962 said:
Dan,

New add-in for SW Surfacing: Power Surfacing for SolidWorks® Overview

and here is what someone has done with it. https://forum.solidworks.com/commun...dworks-doent-do-trains-planes-and-automobiles

and here is a comment from another using it:

Kevin Quigley Jan 10, 2013 2:07 PM


Mark, we salute you!!


2500 features? Mouth hits floor....


I have been using Power Surfacing recently and I wonder how many features that would take :-)

I have to say that using that plug in makes surfacing in SolidWorks fun again. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone doing ergonomic/organic forms. As far as I am concerned it is a game changer. As I said on Twitter the other day, this add on is a sales driver to SolidWorks. We no longer have to buy Rhino/ Tsplines/ Modo etc. we buy SolidWorks and Power Surfacing.
Click to expand...

That looks very impressive any idea of price?
 
I doubt it's cheaper than Rhino. List price of Rhino is $995, but you can find it for $825 pretty easily from reputable resellers (and they're not afraid to publish a price. Why do most resellers always want you to contact them for a price??)

As for being impressed with 2500 features, that's hardly impressive. We routinely deal with models that have 10,000 surfaces as a start point (from customer data).

Here is another quote from the article:

"Now I have to say to my fellow SW advanced modelers, unequivocally, once you pass the 1500 feature mark, there is what I call “a parametric point of no return” especially so when creating advanced surface features. In other words, the time it takes to rebuild (robustly) 1500 features is not efficient compared to creating new features to supersede the existing design intent – i.e. Whack and hack your model with whatever is necessary at that point in the history tree to get your job done. With that said, I was able to at times venture back to the top of my tree when it was totaled about 2000 features and successfully rebuild my entire model, but usually not without some unforeseen influence on a child feature/s that I had to correct."

Don't have to deal with that nonsense in Rhino. What would he do with a model comprised of 10,000 or more surfaces? Sounds like a nightmare to me.

Anyway, I only mentioned Rhino as a suggestion to the OP as a way to deal with surfacing. I didn't intend to hijack this thread with a pissing contest between products.

Dan
 
Since 2000 I’ve been using SWx and Loogopress3 since 2006 and with this my designs shifted to unprecedented level because of the power of software I acquired. Checkout my personal website http://www.solidCADworkd.com www.solidCADworks.com for some of my dies.

To explore the other possibilities I decided to move to another company using NX for their die designs and currently on training and trying to understand the software. I’ve already seen the powerful surfacing capability of NX and I hope it will provide me the same or better kind tools that Logopress offered. If not I’ll push to go back to SWx with LP3. If I’m using Swx to do my Die designs, then I wouldn’t do it without Logopress.
 
Mike, those are some nice looking models. The progressives look about like what we build using SW and HSMworks. That rotary tool is neat.
 
Thanks XD,
That Rotary Tool was done long ago with basic SWx. At that time (2002?) it was a good learning project and it went very well as planned. Sametime SWx was also been at its primitive stage at that time and not as much as userfriendly like now.
 
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