Chapter 17: Using Hole Wizard and Toolbox
Next, you may receive an assembly from a client. Often, because Toolbox parts are located in an
area where you would not necessarily look for parts, users send assemblies and parts, but do not
send Toolbox parts. You may think that this is okay; after all, you have Toolbox on your system;
therefore, it should pick up your toolbox parts. The truth is that when receiving an assembly from
someone else, you are better off if one of the parties does not have Toolbox on their system.
Huge Screws
If both you and the client who sent the assembly have Toolbox, then you should be okay, right?
Well, yes and no. Yes, your client’s assembly will pick up your Toolbox parts, but no, it will not
work properly because you do not have all the same configurations and sizes that your client has.
In cases like this, you will experience what I have come to refer to as the Huge Screws syndrome.
When SolidWorks finds the right file but cannot find the right configuration, it uses another con-
figuration, usually the Default, which is generally the biggest size. This is where the Huge Screws
name came from.
Part of the really bad news is that if you save your assembly with the Huge Screws, SolidWorks has
no way of knowing that the huge screws are not the correct screws, and you can only solve the
problem manually by going through the assembly and reassigning sizes to the huge screws.
You can work around this by opening an assembly that has not yet been saved with the Huge
Screws, using the Advanced option in the Open dialog box (you can find this in the Configurations
list), and then selecting the New configuration showing assembly structure only option. With this
option, all components are suppressed. You can unsuppress any non-Toolbox parts and continue
working. Ask your client to send you his Toolbox parts and then unsuppress those parts in the
assembly, making sure that it finds the right parts; this is best done by having the correct parts
already open before you open the assembly. These options are shown in Figure 17.12.
If you replace your Toolbox parts with the Toolbox parts from the client, you may experience the
same problem in reverse if you had configs that your client did not. In the end, it would be great to
be able to merge the two parts to combine all the available sizes into a single file. There is a way of
doing that, which I will describe later, but it is a convoluted work-around. Files that have the same
names and different content are at the top of the list of things you shouldn’t do in file management,
and yet the SolidWorks Toolbox system frequently creates this very situation.
A slight retraction
To be fair, SolidWorks fixed the Huge Screws problem in the 2007 version by coming up with a
clever method for figuring out which size is missing and building it on the fly when the assembly is
opened. Additional information about the Toolbox parts is now stored in the assembly, which
helps identify the missing parts. Unfortunately, the fix only works for assemblies that use the parts
from the 2007 or later library and assemblies that have been built in SolidWorks 2007 or later. To
sum up, if you have assemblies built in an older version of SolidWorks and your Toolbox library
becomes corrupted or lost or you are sent an assembly that uses a different Toolbox library, even if
you are working in a version later than SolidWorks 2007, you cannot benefit from this fix.