the work space in Solidworks

We need to increase the work space in Solidworks!!. In order to do a
huge part (a bridge).
We know than the workspace in Solidworks is 1.000.000mm3, centred in
the origin (500.000mm each side of the origin). And the bridge is
bigger than this.

Do anybody know how to increase the workspace in SW. (We cannot change
the scale, only to increase the workspace).Can anybody help us?

 

The standard answer you will get from SolidWorks is that SolidWorks is
a general mechanical engineering tool, not a bridge design tool. Why
would you be trying to do this in SW anyway?

 

Peter,

Sorry man, the 1km limit is hard coded into the system.

About the only way to do it is to scale, or use a system without this
limitation.

Mark

 

I would model up each component full sized except add a derived
configuration of each part that would be scaled 1/10 or 1/100 depending
on the size of your bridge. Then for the assembly of the bridge use
all the scaled down configurations and duely note your drawings.

Regards,
Corey

 

Thanks to all for its answers.

swPeter.

 

Pretty clever, except it would make a mess of incontext modeling. You
might also take a big performance hit in the assembly by having to
calculate all the scales. And if you went the other way and modeled at
1/10 or 1/100 you would have to manually attach dimensions to the
scaled up parts because nothing would transfer. Working in mm for
metres might work. Have to watch density especially if running Cosmos.

 

One possibility may to scale up 10X any in context parts. Then there
would be two basic configurations for every part.

The bridge is going to be big anyway and the performance may be the
biggest issue.

Hope this helps.

Ed

 

Another issue that may come up is the fact that reference geometry like
planes and axes don't scale. Also, blocks won't scale. So the tools
that might be used to automate the process and carry intent through may
not be usable or require an inordinate amount of book keeping effort to
make work.

In other words, if he makes an envelope part consisting of planes and
axes to drive the overall layout of the bridge, it will not scale so it
might be useful for constructing the bridge model, but wouldn't be
available for the drawings that will need to be made.

 

There is a partial Work-around or better planning for this situation in
some cases.

If you generate the Axis or plane off of geometry and move it after the
scale feature it will follow the geometry because it is referencing the
surface edge and vertex IDs at that point in the tree. So reference
geometry when created after the scale feature will move appropriately
with the scalar change, although it appears in 2006 SP4.1 it requires
a CTRL-Q to cause the reference geometry to update.