CAPINC Awarded
Number One in Customer Satisfaction in North America by SolidWorks Corp.
At SolidWorks World in New Orleans in February, SolidWorks announced the winner of their independent survey of customers in North America. Based on the data collected, CAPINC received consistently good marks from our customers.
Jeff Ray (right), COO SolidWorks Corp., congratulates Dana Seero and CAPINC on their award for Number One in Customer Satisfaction in North America.
Thank you to all our customers for participating in the SolidWorks Customer Satisfaction survey. We appreciate your loyalty and promise to serve you even better in 2007! We plan to continue our staff expansion and training, and implement a new CRM system to improve on our support and administrative functions. Look for a new interactive web-based tool to provide remote on-screen assistance - coming soon!
"CAPINC set the standard for excellence in customer satisfaction in 2006," said Jeff Ray, COO SolidWorks Corp.
CAPINC is always open to your suggestions. Please email CAPINC with your feedback. We'd love to hear from you!
Westborough office expansion
CAPINC has announced the completion of its office expansion in Westborough MA. Driven by steady growth and customer demand, the company has tripled its office space and plans to double its local staff of account managers and engineers. Westborough press release
CAPINC engineers earn accolades
We are proud to announce that once again CAPINC engineering manager Jason Pancoast has aced the SolidWorks Model Mania contest at SolidWorks World 2007. This competition pits both end users and VAR application engineers against a live standardized modeling and editing test. This is the second win in a row for Jason, one of only 12 engineers in the world who have earned the title "Elite Application Engineer" from SolidWorks.
In addition, our engineering staff continues to earn certifications. Trust the AE's at CAPINC to provide you with the latest and greatest in CAD technology:
Jason Pancoast:
DriveWorks Certified Application Engineer Level 2
Certified PDMWorks Enterprise Support Technician
Keith Pedersen:
DriveWorks Certified Application Engineer Level 2
Certified PDMWorks Enterprise Support Technician
Frank Pampreen:
Certified PDMWorks Enterprise Support Technician
Alan Zullo:
Certified SolidWorks Support Technician
Shuvom Ghose:
Certified SolidWorks Instructor
Pictured: Keith Pedersen, Principal engineer and author of KAP's Corner; Jason Pancoast, CAPINC engineering manager, "Elite Application Engineer" and 2-time winner of SolidWorks Model Mania award; Jeff Ray, COO SolidWorks Corp; Frank Pampreen, Data solutions manager
Frank Pampreen was recently promoted to Data Solutions Manager at CAPINC and will be managing PDMWorks Enterprise implementations. Frank earned his BSME from the University of Michigan. After graduation, Frank served as a Navy Submarine Officer. He has been with CAPINC since 1995 and served in various roles: SDRC Application engineer,
SGI System Administrator,
IT manager, Certified SolidWorks AE, Microsoft Windows network specialist and PDMWorks implementation engineer. In his spare time, Frank is the director of Christian Emergency Response Volunteers. Click here to see what Frank does for fun.
Community involvement
CAPINC believes in supporting our local communities. As a company, we want to not only provide the best customer service to our customers, but also try to improve the quality of life for people in the places where we live and work. We are proud to support organizations through our community involvement program:
Rory McCarthy of MWF has hand-cycled across the US and around the world! He is also a mentor to MIT undergrads and frequently talks at other schools and universities.
Move With Freedom helps people with disabilities achieve life-transforming improvements in their mobility. Designs that help people move with freedom. Designs created by teams that enjoy a challenge. Move With Freedom fosters open design efforts for mobility equipment for people with disabilities.
Mobility Without Barriers Foundation is an international humanitarian organization that has developed safer, more versatile assisted-mobility options for children and adults with disabilities. The new designs are all-terrain, multiple-gear mobility cycles that resolve many of the difficulties associated with conventional push rim and tricycle wheelchairs.
Julie’s is a community-based family support and education program that is committed to the development of strong, healthy family functioning. Julie’s breaks the cycle of poverty among low-income, at-risk families by providing services that enable mothers and their children to become healthy, responsible, successful at life, and economically self-sufficient members of their communities.
Training
CAP Universities - New topics!
Check the schedule for a free training seminar in your area. CAP Universities are free for CAPINC subscription customers.
3D Sketching
SolidWorks Animator
File Management
PDMWorks Enterprise Seminar
Surfacing
SolidWorks Design Library
PhotoWorks
Keith Pedersen ponders the next CAP University topic at our new facility in Westborough MA.
Q2 Training Schedule available - New classes added!
Smart Fasteners have been improved to handle more assembly situations correctly, including staggered patterns. Learn about the latest features in SolidWorks at a CAPINCtraining course.
News from SolidWorks
SolidWorks 2008 Beta now available
SolidWorks Corporation announced the 2008 Beta Program. This year, the Beta Contest has expanded prizes to recognize the top Beta testers who help with this Beta Program! Another first for this year's Beta Program will be to award one customer the grand prize of a full commercial copy of SolidWorks 2008 Office Premium with one year of subscription support. Please visit the following website to sign up for the SolidWorks 2008 Beta Program:
http://beta.solidworks.com
SolidWorks Design Contest
The SolidWorks Design contest is accepting entries next year's challenge. Eleven winners took home more than US$150,000 in prizes and were spotlighted at the SolidWorks World 2007 International User Conference and Exposition earlier this year in New Orleans. “The Oscars® have nothing on this competition,” said Rainer Gawlick, SolidWorks vice president of worldwide marketing. “There are miraculous design engineering performances every day with SolidWorks, and these winning designs are indicative of the great products SolidWorks customers create every day. They inspire us all to design better products.” Read about the winners.
You are invited to attend a FREE technology seminar on PDMWorks® Enterprise -- the SolidWorks PDM solution that can help your company manage and share all the data related to your designs more effectively. Hear live customer testimonials from Automatic Systems, Inc (ASI), and Tigercat. Also weighing in on the value of Data Management will be Jeff Ray, Chief Operating Officer of SolidWorks Corporation.
Come and see how the entire line of COSMOS design analysis products can help shorten your design cycle. Walk through the process of setting up and conducting design analysis on a variety of parts and assemblies. Presented by Kishore Boyalakuntla the national technical manager of analysis products from
SolidWorks Corporation who will guide you through a variety of FEA studies to help you improve your SolidWorks designs.
Does your company design or engineer-to-order? Do you have repetitive design tasks that could be automated? Could your products be defined by a set of rules and equations? Do you need a product/sales configurator? Attend this webcast and discover how you can create custom products in minutes...not days.
Stop by our booth 5532 at EASTEC and all CAPINC customers will receive a free gift! Our booth will be the center of attention with SolidWorks and 2 Dimension machines, including the *NEW* Dimension Elite. We'll also be demonstrating a *NEW* 3D scanner product that will awe and amaze you. (Stay tuned for the announcement!) If you currently own a 3D Printer, you will be interested in the new MAGICS software for manipulating files before printing. We will also be showing the latest partner products, including PDMWorks Enterprise, COSMOSWorks and DriveWorks.
Try the COSMOSWorks Professional Hands-on Test Drive and see how COSMOS can improve your product quality by indicating how your SolidWorks models will behave before they are built.
Now you can study the real-world performance of different design alternatives without ever leaving the SolidWorks window. Seminar signup
SolidWorks Hands-On Test Drive with 3D Skills
Lower costs and shorter product development cycles are two reasons why moving from 2D CAD to 3D product design software is becoming an urgent priority for more and more organizations. Another reason is that the use of 3D product design data is beginning to overtake the use of 2D CAD data, so 3D compatibility is increasingly more important to your customers and suppliers, too. While the 2D-to-3D transition may seem like a formidable challenge for many organizations, product designers who move ahead with the transition are often surprised to learn that it’s actually much easier than they’d imagined, and the payoff is much greater, as well. Seminar signup
User Groups
5/2
6:00 PM
Central Ma/Northern CT SolidWorks User Group
Keith Pedersen from CAPINC presents the topic "File Management"
“Keith Pedersen has the SolidWorks dexterity of a Chinese gymnast and the propensity for entertaining a crowd without the use of face paint. You will surely learn something new about SolidWorks after he’s done!” – Edson Gebo, Co-chair of the CMNC-SWUG
Morgan Construction, Worcester MA
CAPINC is sponsoring this meeting, and will be raffling off an iPod Nano, a CAPINC training coupon and a Green Mountain coffee gift bag.
The Dimension Elite 3D Printer provides engineers and designers stronger, functional models with finer feature detail and improved surface finish. Priced at $32,900*, the Elite features an 8 x 8 x 12-inch build envelope and uses a new, stronger ABS material, ABSplus.
ABSplus is on average 40 percent stronger than standard ABS material, making it ideally suited for testing the form, fit and function of inherently fragile, fine-featured models. See the parts and printer at our upcoming Dimension Roadshows.
Material order forms
Material order forms are now available on our website. For your convenience, you can find these formed on the Dimension product page. Material Order Forms
Dimension MAGICS now available
If you currently own a 3D Printer, you will be interested in the new MAGICS software which includes: - Fix Wizard to repair faulty .STL files before production. - Part measurement and visualization of .STL files. - Creation of saw-tooth cuts in large parts to facilitate easy, precision fitting of pieces. Stop by our booth at EASTEC to see a demo!
Hot Tech Tips
KAP’s Corner - Reducing SolidWorks File Sizes
The size of your SolidWorks files are affected by a lot of factors. Although there are some good tips-n-tricks circulating out on the Web on this topic, the different file and session settings often interreact with each other. This can cause two users, with differently tuned systems, to report wide differences in the benefit of implementing the same tip. The past 6 versions of SolidWorks have also introduced changes to some of the options that were used to tune both performance and file size, so this topic has been something of a moving target.
When CAPINCruns a class on File Management, the discussion of how to reduce file sizes, especially for shipment via Email, consistently generates the most excitement. So for this installment of KAP’s Corner, we ’ll bring you up-to-date on factors that affect file size in 2007.
Most people know that you can delete lines from a sketch, or features from the Solidworks feature Manager, by pre-electing the object(s) and then simply hitting the DELETE key. But did you know, that over the last 4 years, the programmers have enhanced the intelligence behind the DELETE key, allowing it to react differently in the following situations:
BODIES: If what you have pre-selected are Solid or Surface Bodies, the DELETE key will instead launch the function INSERT - FEATURES - DELETE BODY.
PATTERNS: If what you pre-selected were members of a feature Pattern, the DELETE key will pop-up a dialog asking you if you really wanted to delete the entire pattern, or if instead you wanted to add the selected pattern members to the "SKIP LIST".
SURFACE EDGES: If what you pre-selected was an edge curve from an interior 'hole' in a surface face, the DELETE key will automatically run the function INSERT - SURFACE - UNTRIM, which will 'heal' the surface to eliminate the hole.
Tech Tip #2 Hiding/Showing Bodies
The out-of-the-box Solidworks user interface is tuned for the majority of users, who are typically doing machine design of single-bodied components. However, if you tend to work with a lot of Solid or Surface bodies on-screen, (perhaps because you are doing a lot of Surface modeling, or because you make extensive use of Boolean operations), there is a handy function under the VIEW menu which is turned OFF by default. to turn it on, select:
VIEW - CUSTOMIZE MENU, and turn ON the check-box next to the function, "HIDE/SHOW BODIES".
Once you have activated this function, it will place you in a toggle-mode. Any bodies currently HIDDEN, will display in a translucent gray, and any bodies currently SHOWN, will display normally. Simply click on any component to change its status between HIDE or SHOW, and when you close the dialog, the grayed-out bodies will vanish. This is a lot more convenient than hunting thru the BODIES folder, or right-mouse-clicking over each body individually.
Tech Tip #3 Removing Items from a Weldment Cut-List
If you have used the Weldment feature to automate the creation of a multi-body Part file, but you have also created additional Bodies manually in the file, you might not want every Body to appear in the Cut-List on a drawing. For example, some of these bodies could have been modeled to represent fasteners, or trim items, or pieces of removable tooling. The trick is to mark these bodies as "Weld Beads".
The programmers knew that you might want to model the physical volume of Weld Beads, but not display these as line items in the Cut-List, so they create each line of weld with a "Do Not Print" property. Now you can assign this same property manually, to any body. Simply right-mouse-click over any face of the body, and select "Make Weld Bead". (This is a rarely-used item, so you might have to expand the pop-up menu to full size, to see it). NOTE: in Solidworks 2007 you will NOT find this option when you right-mouse-click over the Body in the Cut-List folder. You must right-mouse-click over the Feature icon, or over any Face of the body.
Now available! SolidWorks 2007 Hotkeys
We've updated the popular 8.5 x 11 laminated card featuring the SolidWorks 2007 Hotkeys and the "Recommended SolidWorks Export Formats". To receive your free copy of this useful handout, please send us an email with "Hotkeys 2007" in the subject line. Be sure to include your mailing address. Request yours now!
Customer News CAP 500 at F1 Boston
A good time was had by all who attended our CAP University training day at F1 Boston. Stay tuned for our next event and save the date - August 9th!
Jason Pancoast explains 3D sketching.
Consulting with Keith on Pit Row.
Dana demos the finer points of 3D printing.
Jason Graves shows how to engineer-to-order with DriveWorks.
Suiting up.
Ready to race!
Jason Pancoast (CAPINC engineering manager) discusses strategy with Konstantin Derman from Communication & Power Industries
Winner! Stephen Crane from Caliper Life Sciences
Congratulations to all!!
Feedback
Please send any additional suggestions, issues or comments to marketing@capinc.com.
At Computer-Aided Products, we empower our customers to make more money with their CAD design environment. We are a value-added reseller (VAR) for SolidWorks and the Stratasys Dimension 3D printer. We specialize in transitioning designers from a 2D environment to a 3D solid CAD world, providing the training and service you need to get up to speed quickly. Our partnership with the best CAD solutions in the industry, along with our years of expertise and practical experience, provide a solid foundation for your CAD future.
Computer-Aided Products, Inc.
Serving all of New England with offices in Manchester NH, Peabody MA and Westborough MA.
(800) 424-2255 www.capinc.com
*REMOVE: This is being sent to customers of Computer-Aided Products. If you do not want to receive email from us, please reply with "REMOVE" in the subject line. Thank you!
