Design Intent

Hi

The company I work for has recently switched over to Solidworks and we do a
lot of drawings for boiler feed pump components. When it comes to drawing a
model of a pump shaft I was wondering what the best way to go about it was
regarding the design intent.

Is it best to use the 'Potter's Wheel Approach' or the 'Manufacturing
Approach' the shafts we produce are usually about 8ft long, with all the
usual feature of fillets, keyways etc.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

I feel an idiot for asking this but what plane do most people sketch on?
Right or front plane? Does it matter?

Thanks
David

 

If your shafts are all very similar I would suggest making a template of a
finished shaft and using this shaft template instead of reinventing the
wheel every time a new shaft comes along. This way you will save alot of
time since all the surfaces will have the same internal ID no matter which
shaft you are working with. This will aid in swapping out one shaft for
another in an assembly (Replace Components), and if you copy a drawing of
another shaft and replace references to the new shaft before opening all (or
atleast most) of your dimensions should update to the new shaft. Also in
creating the shaft there will be less thinking involved just edit the dims
of the features that need to change.

Corey

 

To add to Corey's reply. A design table may also be helpful. Rather
than clicking the features and changing the dimensions there you could
enter your dimensions in to the excell table and the part would update
and create configurations automatically.

 

For what its worth, I always use the FRONT plane as a basis for my
models
if only because it uses the same XYZ as those of a 3d sketch;
therefore it does not require any transformations if/when I ever have
to extract data from the model....