The people that have been in the Solidworks conversations on here may have seen my dreamy posts of “I want to do that".

Well a combination of having an epiphany foot up the bum good talking to myself on my 30th birthday I have decided to take the plunge.

I enrolled in OU BEng in Product Design which is being funded by my employer and yesterday personally purchased Solidworks 2014 student addition for £150. It’s the full version with FEA.

I am going to use the inbuilt tutorials to get me going; I can use 2D stuff and have done some basic 3D stuff. I recon I will have it locked down in 15 hours (I wish!!).

This, as well as getting registered as an Incorporated Engineer with IPEM and studying an OU degree is all gearing up to me changing jobs in the near future. I already have some very good product development experience.

Ill keep you all posted with my progress, if anybody wants me to do anything then U2U me and I will see if I can draw it!

On a separate note if anybody is looking for an experienced product developer that has mechanical electronic manufacturing experience based in London or Kent, please U2U me! I have a track record of managing projects from market research through to market delivery, on time, in budget.

Good move. I like solidworks...

I was lucky enough to have their training passport with the package the company I work for purchased so I spent a year going on as much training as I could.
It's a fantastic piece of software

Great tool. I've been using it since 97 Plus, which was the release in 2nd half of 1997

Its a useful and good piece of software and for 150 you can't go wrong. But it is buggy and missing some pretty glaringly obvious features (want to do a design analysis for rotational inertia? Tough, only mass is available despite MOI being calculated with mass!) at times! But it is a /lot/ better than it was 4 years ago, just make sure you have a very good machine if you plan large assemblies!

Be very careful if you plan to make any money from it. The student version is intended purely for learning and Solidworks will take a dim view of it being used to earn money.

Also, I believe that it puts some kind of watermark on the drawings which can't be removed if they are ever opened in the full commercial version.

Enjoy learning it...it is an awesome piece of kit... lots of good tutorials on you tube if you search.

Alan

I'm an engineering student and my lecturer records some of the Solidworks lessons and tutorials and uploads them to youtube. So here is the channel

https://www.youtube.com/user/CADlessons