Good CAD practice for Aircraft Design

Last updated 03/03/2013

1. You should use parts for the individual components of your aircraft such as
wings, engines, seats, etc and assemble them together in an assembly to
make a complete model. If you dont fully understand the difference between
parts and assemblies, go back to the tutorials.
2. Building parts then assemblies is known as bottom up design. Top down
design starts with a layout sketch in an assembly from which you create
parts. Bottom up design means that your key geometry tends to get stored in
various different places which can mean some effort to update the design,
however it is much easier to manage than top down and is recommended for
non expert CAD users.
3. Understand how the rollback bar works. If you dont get this concept then
you need to go back to the tutorials.
4. It is advised that each member is fully aware of which section of the design
they themselves and others are working on. This allows changes to be made
only to the most recent versions of work when it comes to collaboration.
5. When transferring an assembly, make sure to send all the SolidWorks parts
that make up the assembly or else it will not be viewable. This can be done
with the pack and go function of SolidWorks which compiles all the parts that
make up an assembly and can then be zipped (File > Pack and Go...).
6. Special attention has to be paid to the dimensions of which each group
member is using. A good idea is to agree on the dimension scale the project
will use at the outset and to all work under the same units.
7. Be warned than SolidWorks typically has zero backward compatibility with
earlier version of the software. If you save with a later version it is usually
impossible to go back to using an earlier version. Unless you are doing the
CAD work on your own, you must use the version of SW in the computer
cluster (2012).
8. It is advisable that groups start with simple representations of each part and
gradually add more detail. For example in the case of the wing, an idea would
be to design the wing cross section as simply elliptical and later incorporate
better aerofoil representations.
9. Practice making assemblies from simple parts before trying to assemble the
final aircraft.
10.Be smart when mating parts in your assembly. A Good choice of mates will
make it simple to make adjustments allowing you to be able to simply update
the assembly after any changes. It is often a good idea to add specific
geometry to your parts to aid mating, e.g. for attaching wings to a round
fuselage, try creating some pegs in the fuselage and matching holes in the
wing root.
11.Name the features you create in parts with meaningful names, e.g. if a bossextrude is going to be a seat cushion then rename something like seat

extrude. This helps no end in finding bugs in parts and assemblies as they
get more complex.
12.To annotate a 3D model from the options at the top of the window (insert >
annotations >Note). The annotations can be seen from any orientation and
are shown plane to the screen at all times. It is suggested that you use a tight
rectangular box, a straight leader and attach the leader to the centre of note.
The font should be set in the document properties
(Tools>Options>Document Properties>Notes). You can turn off annotations by
view>Hide all types.
13.You create an exploded view of your final assembly to show all the parts
separately (insert>exploded view). This exploded view can be turned on and
off (search help for Exploding and Collapsing an Exploded View)
14.Leave all appearance work until the end when the aircraft is fully designed as
problems can arise with the saved appearances and any changes to the parts
may mean having to reapply the appearance settings, which can be
frustrating.
15.For high quality rendering of your finished CAD models use PhotoView 360,
which is built into SolidWorks. Be aware that to achieve high quality rendering
significant effort may be required to understand how the rendering process
works, e.g. use of materials, lighting, render effects. Do not expect this to be
easy. Note, however, rendering is only necessary for the final poster output.