SolidWorks 2010 Bible

Chapter 17: Using Hole Wizard and Toolbox

Smart Fasteners with Hole Series

One way to use Smart Fasteners is in conjunction with Hole Wizard Hole Series. Hole Series cre-

ates the holes through multiple parts at once, creating the appropriate type of hole through each

part, and then Smart Fasteners automatically places fasteners in the holes, even including nuts and

washers. To do this, you can select the option on the last panel of the Hole Series PropertyManager

interface, as shown in Figure 17.19. If you are planning on using Smart Fasteners, using them in

conjunction with the Hole Series holes is your best bet.

FIGURE 17.19

The Place Fastener option

The Smart Fasteners with Hole Series is a function that you should be careful with. It is very effec-

tive, but it may cost you some performance (speed). The Hole Series is an assembly feature that

drives several in-context features, and then parts are mated to those in-context features (fasteners).

Smart Fasteners Populate All

Smart Fasteners functionality has an even more automatic component. Once an assembly has parts

mated into place, you can place fasteners into parts with appropriate holes by face, by part, or for

the entire assembly at once.

Caution
You may not want to spend a lot of time trying to use this type of the Smart Fasteners functionality. I have tried
to find examples where Smart Fasteners works well and predictably, but with limited success. I have searched
through training examples, through tutorial files from SolidWorks, and have even made some of my own exam-
ple files. I have looked for presentations from user groups and SolidWorks World that use Smart Fasteners, but
no one appears to be talking about this functionality. Although in theory, it offers interesting functionality, in
reality, it receives very little attention — definitely a warning sign.

The one assembly that I did find where Smart Fasteners worked surprisingly well (in fact, almost perfectly) was
from the sample files that installed with SolidWorks. Upon closer examination, the reason this worked well was
because it used assembly features for the holes, and so the holes did not appear in the individual parts. If that is
the price that you have to pay just to get fasteners to populate automatically, then you will probably rather put
them all in manually. n