r/SolidWorks

Hi everyone,

Today I finally passed the official SOLIDWORKS CSWA exam with a perfect score, and honestly, I'm still incredibly happy about it.

I spent the last few weeks preparing while balancing a full-time job, my master's degree, and personal CAD projects for portfolio.

Going into the exam I was extremely nervous, and I honestly thought I might fail. What surprised me the most was that the real exam was much harder than I expected. 😂

Now that CSWA is done, I'd like to start preparing for the CSWP.

I'd really appreciate some advice from people who have already passed it:

- Which CSWP segment did you find the most difficult?

- What skills should I absolutely master ?

- Are there any practice exams, PDFs, YouTube channels or other learning resources you would recommend?

- What mistakes do most people make during the exam?

- How different is the difficulty compared to CSWA?

My plan is to spend the next few weeks preparing properly instead of rushing into the exam, so any tips or study material would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

I've cut objects in half with solidworks a bunch of times and never had this issue, can anybody help me figure out why it won't work? I've tried it with this sketch on the vertical plane and I've also tried it with a sketch on a plane I created on the dividing line and both ways when I try to do the extruded cut it tells me that it failed due to geometric conditions. I can't figure out what is causing it.

UPDATE: I'm not 100% sure, but something to do with the mirror feature down the center of the face must have been causing the problem. I went back to when the model was just one side of the face and did everything to that part, then mirrored each separate part.

The only model difference between the two screenshots is that the leftmost and rightmost lines are toggled between construction and "real" geometry. I am very new to Solidworks, but I've done my fair share of Fusion and some Freecad as well. I feel that the screenshots here show a fundamental flaw of connected concerns.

A symmetry constraint should not care whether the constraint targets are "real", and the axis should be forced to be construction. I understand that the solver requires these property values so that it can figure out how to implement symmetry. But if it can't figure it out, it should ask me for the role that each selected entity should play. Instead, the system denies me the right to create a symmetry constraint, thus connecting the concerns of construction/real and symmetry constraint availability in the worst way possible -- by disallowing functionality. Yes I can do (and have done) it another way, but I shouldn't have to.

If this were my software product, I would toss a couple of items in the backlog to fix this. Can someone tell me if I am wrong and why?

Just completed the Torsional Analysis on a Universal Joint considering one shaft to be fixed and another one subjected to 100 N-m of Torque.

Material Used : Alloy Steel

As it was my first time, do the numbers look realistic, do I need to make any further improvements to make it look professional?

Live CAD modeling challenges! today at 1 PM east coast east coast https://www.youtube.com/live/XbL0COWRAOw

Sometimes I use contrasting colors in an assembly but then want to render in nice colors. If I have them all be black which is how I want it rendered I can't see the parts while designing.

hi guys, what the title says. i sketched and cut extrude the square and rectangle on two different planes but i cant figure out for the life of me how to dimension the distance between them to be 22.01 mm because of that. please help, i asked ai but it didnt make sense, and i tried using the distance feature to put the planes that far apart but that also didnt work: ((

In the last 15 years I have being designing products on software like Inventor, SolidWorks and Fusion.

One thing that always bothered me was the lack of first class support to other operating systems than Windows.

FreeCAD is a great product but is not intuitive for anyone coming from SolidWorks/Inventor/NX.

So I decided to change that, I am developing Oblikovati, an open source, multi platform ( runs and builds for Linux Wayland, Mac Universal and Windows) Parametric B-Rep CAD which is super lightweight.

Oblikovati is developed from the ground up, not a wrapper around OpenCascade, using GoLang and modern Vulkan API.

It opens in a second. You can using any mid tier hardware and it runs smoothly.

I have development builds ready to run for all OSes on GitHub: https://github.com/Oblikovati/Oblikovati

The features I expect to ship for a first stable release are already there incluing:

- Parameters & Complete Parameters Solver.

- Sketch 2D and 3D with complete Constraints Solver.

- Part Modelling including Sheet Metal support.

- Drawings & Annotations.

- Basic Assembly with Joints & Constraints + Assembly Parameters Linking.

- Imports: DXF, DWG, PDF Vectors, Obj, Stl, STEP, Various Point Cloud Files.

- Exports: DXF, STEP, STL, 3MF, OBJ.

I am happy to receive bug reports, feature requests and any feedback helping to bring the software faster to a stable release 1.