Lesson 11 – Detecting Interference, Editing and Exploding the Assembly and Creating Multiple
Assembly Configurations
Section IV – Modeling Assemblies 11.4 Detecting Collision
In the Feature Manager design tree, right-click on the part that you want to edit and
select Open Part or Edit Part.
Open Part will open the Part file.
Clicking Edit Part will do two things:
1) the design tree of the part being edited will become blue, and
2) in the solid model, only the part being edited will remain solid and all the others
will become transparent.
Click the plus sign to open the part design tree.
Make changes to the features or sketches.
To return to the assembly from the edit mode, right-click on the Top Assembly icon and
select the Edit Assembly icon.11.4 Detecting Collision
Detecting collision when a mechanism moves is another useful feature in SolidWorks. Collisions
are expensive and time consuming to fix.
Step 86: Click Move Component or Rotate Component.
On the PropertyMenu, click Collision Detection.
Drag or rotate the moving part.
Depending of the options selected, you can stop the motion of colliding parts, make
them change color, or make a sound.11.5 The Exploded Assembly
Exploded assemblies are very useful. It is
easier to understand complex assemblies and
the assembly sequence when the components
are shown exploded.
Step 87: Click on the ConfigurationManager
icon to get Figure 11.2.
The figure shows only one
configuration called Default. It is the
name that SolidWorks gave the
assembly we created earlier.
Figure 11. 2 – ConfigurationManager showing the
Default Configuration