SW Toolbox

Could anyone give me an indication on how much extra SW toolbox would cost?

Currently just have basic version of SW, but pay supcription.

Regards

Graeme

UK

 

(Rob) wrote in

The initial cost of the software is $500 (US) if you can get them to sell
it to you separately, but they will try to sell it bundled into SW Office
for $1000 (US) with a lot of other stuff you may or may not need.

The real cost of the software will come when you lose all of your fastener
data during re-install or when sharing data with other people, or when your
hole wizard suddenly won't work, or all the time you'll take figuring out
the network settings to get it to work shared among several users, or all
the time you'll spend cursing because Smart Fasteners only works in limited
situations, or when you decide that you would like your part numbers or
materials to show up in the Bom for the Toolbox parts. I'm not sure that
all this is on the reseller's pricelist, but I'm sure its at least 5 times
the initial cost of the software.

Your best bet is to forget your VAR told you about Toolbox and make your
own library. It will save you time and money. Your VAR won't refund your
money for TB when you find out what a pile of sh_t it is. If your whine
patrol requires specific examples, please google search this newsgroup for
toolbox. Plenty of examples there.


A. H.

 

Whoa, sounds like someone's dog needs a good swift kick...

PLEASE NOTE: I do NOT advocate the wanton abuse of animals and I would never
kick a dog. This is an attempt at humor, lame humor at that (hey, I'm no bob
z.)

Richard

 

I tend to agree with Armadillo Hunter. Nothing beats a part that you
drive with a nice clean design table.

 

I can say that smart fasteners are a godsend if you need them. It is
just click & drag to place a socket head cap screw in a counterbore.
2003 sometimes has a hard time putting a SHCS in some holes for
unknown reasons, but it works pretty well. Not using 2004 yet and
assume it has gotten better.

Bo

 

No Bo, it has not gotten better.

 

Agreed. The add-ins have been severely neglected for a long time. The
exception is PhotoWorks, but look at the mess that PW2 made.

 

If your approach to tb is to 'just try it' w/o looking into
reccomended installation and upgrade procedures, you will be in for a
rough road. I am in a multi user, networked environment and have had
no such problems as you describe and find the capability invaluable.
I'm strictly sheet metal and the ability to drag and drop pem hardware
has saved me countless hours.
New configurations need to be correctly identified and described to be
of use in BOM.
Like many things, it works like it works and that is not always how
you think it should. Granted, this is far from perfect, far from idiot
proof, but the issues you raise here can be attributed to faulty
installation resulting from ignorance of proper procedures. I can
sympathize with your frustration, but can't fault the software.


d

 

Where did you initially find the expertise it takes to install this
correctly? Not from the Toolbox documentation that comes with the
product, I'll wager. I learned about the product by initially setting
up an installation that utterly failed for our design process, and then
doing some investigation into why it failed and how to fix it.
Truthfully, the product is designed for failure out of the box. It is
set up so that the average Joe will fail by default. If you have
succeeded, congratulations, you are part of an elite few who really know
how to run the software.

You can drag and drop from a personally developed library also, so
Toolbox has only saved you the time of building the library, but how
much time have you spent getting your company's part numbers or
descriptions into Toolbox? That's a part-by-part endeavor, and compared
to a design table approach, completely counterbalances the time saved
building the library. Also, how do you like working with the
"ideosyncratic" file names for PEMs? Do all the users at your facility
know how to make all of this work? How much training and retraining
(and error correction) does that take?

Well, actually, you can fault the software. If you have a shared
installation, and are using 2004, you now have a problem with your Hole
Wizard that you didn't have before. That's a fault with the software.
The TB and HW databases are now combined, and while there are provisions
for "read only" on the TB parts, there is nothing like that for HW.

Only recently (past 6 months) have they fixed another bug which made the
TB sharing really work reliably.

I congratulate your ability to work with a poorly designed tool. I
don't contest your accusation that faulty installation and lack of
product knowledge are to blame for failed implementations of Toolbox,
but truthfully, the fact that the software installs with only one size
for each piece of hardware is the first ingredient in a recipe for
failure, followed by defaulting to configuration use and local
installations. No one who knows what they're up against would recommend
this arrangement, and the people at SW probably know better. The
average Joe installing the software doesn't have any idea about this.

Anyway. Just for general education, could you please talk a little
about what sorts of things you have done to make TB work for you? What
have you done with properties for the BOM?


Armadillo Hunter

 

I'm a new SW user and have played with TB and determined it was not really
all that handy for given things (structural steel, extruded or formed items,
or any parts which are cut to size and could be changed to a different shape
in another design). I created some design tables and intelligent parts
which can be changed and manipulated much easier than those form TB. I
would like to be able to use TB efficiently, so how does one find or learn
the proper way to use TB?

Keith Streich

 

No 'expertise' here. I learned much the same as you: T&E. I
experienced the same problems as everyone else who blindly installed
the product without knowing what they were doing. But, that makes me
the lamer and is no reflection on the performance of the program. OK,
installation could be simpler and safer, but the instructions are
easily located and a little insight into what the installation process
has on existing installations and configurations should raise
questions in ones mind that should send them searching for the answers
before blindly pressing <NEXT>.

My end solution consisted of placing the data on a shared partition on
my HD. Other users use that as the installation point for their
install.

The part names associated with Pem products are exactly what they
should be. The descriptions I add as I create new configurations.
These are pretty generic (PEM NUT, FLUSH PEM NUT......) and take about
5 seconds to enter. 5 seconds per new piece of hardware. Not that much
for the complete confidence I have that it will be correct.

Around the time I started with SolidWorks (98+), I started down the
library path. Too much work, too prone to mistakes for me. Entering
all the data associated with a single configuration of a single type
of hardware takes several minutes to enter, check and re-check.
Information already in TB, like min sheet thickness, min center to
edge, hole diameter in sheet and other critical information make no
sense for me to create when already available.

As for the major conversions, it has been extremely helpful to have
experience in Access and Visual Basic. All data is contained in Access
tables and is fairly easy to follow.

There are things that could be better, but for HW at least, I'm pretty
happy with the results. It might not work for everyone, but it works
very well for me. To say that the add-in is a POS because it doesn't
meet my needs is much the same as saying SWX is a POS because it
doesn't have full blown FEA capabilites built in and doesn't install
with the color of background I prefer.


Dave