Part II: Building Intelligence into Your Parts
- At this point, you should notice that something does not look right. This is because
creating the fillets after the Shell causes the outside fillets to break through some of the
inside corners. The fillets should have failed, but have not, as shown in Figure 11.32.
FIGURE 11.32
Fillets that should have failed- Choose Tools ➪ Options ➪ Performance, and select Verification on rebuild. Then
click OK to exit the Performance menu and press Ctrl+Q. The fillets should now fail. - Click Undo to return the feature order to the way it was.
- Save the part.
Summary
Working effectively with feature history, even in complex models, is a requirement for working
with parts that others have created. When I get a part from someone else, the first thing that I usu-
ally do is look at the FeatureManager and roll it back if possible to get an idea of how the part was
modeled. Looking at sketches, relations, feature order, symmetry, redundancy, sketch reuse, and
so on are important steps in being able to repair or edit any part. Using modeling best practice
techniques helps ensure that when edits have to be done, they are easy to accomplish, even if they
are done by someone who did not build the part.Evaluation techniques are really the heart of editing, as you should not make too many changes
without a basic evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the current model. SolidWorks pro-
vides a wide array of evaluation tools. Time spent learning how to use the tools and interpret the
results is time well spent.