solid works?

my company is a general contractor, 90 % industrial. in the drafting side,
we do precision cnc work as well sheetmetal duct, boxes ,enclosures, tanks,
cyclones ect. also a fair amount of structural steel work. there's 3 cad
guys in the industrial side (all 3d), mostly doing layout work... complete
projects. there's another 3 in the laser/ cnc side (both 2s & 3d). then a
few more that kinda float & don't really do much drawing.
the solidworks salesman is wanting to come do a presentation for us to try &
sell it to us. my feeling is that it will aide the laser side, but not the
industrial side. I have never seen it. can anyone give me some insight? is
much info lost if we needed to import one into the other? TIA


Rob

 

First. I will say that most of my experience is AutoCAD (over 20 years) and
about 6 years of Pro Engineer. I used Solidworks briefly for about a year,
but that was 5 years ago. I liked it then. Haven't seen the newer versions.
With that said, I think you shoud certainly let them give and give you an
on-site demo (should be no charge, and you can maybe even see some of your
stuff loaded in to solidworks and play with it). The 3D is certainly
superior to AutoCAD's 3D - almost anything would be. I can't speak for how
easily it will generate 2d plots from the solid models. Solidworks, like Pro
E, is fully parametric, meaning you can change a dimension on an existing
model and the model will update accordingly. In AutoCAD, if you want to
change a solid, you basically throw it out and draw a new one.

Solid works is almost as good as Pro E, and certainly less expensive,
although it's probably higher thanAutoCAD. Worth a close look, in my
opinion. Perhaps the greatest strength of parametric modelers like Pro E and
Solidworks are their power as a designers visualization tool, to see exactly
how stuff fits together before you actually build the prototype, and find
out it doesn't exactly work like you thought. Both have pretty steep
learning curves, and will take some considerable adjustment for those guys
used to mostly 2D AutoCAD. Hope this helps.

babygrand

 

If I remember right, you do a lot of sheet layout. with AutoCAD. I have
never used Soliworks but believe that it's sheetmetal functionality is at
least as good as Inventor, which I have used. It will save you hours of time
in that area. Build the solid model, click a button and instant flat
pattern. Solid modeling is also far superior to AutoCAD. It would surely be
worth your time.