Guest Post/Tutorial by Best Engineering Aids and Consultancies Pvt. Ltd. (BEACON India) Author – Mr. Ronak Kamani
SOLIDWORKS Inspection is a powerful tool designed to automate and streamline the creation of inspection documents, reducing manual errors and saving valuable time. Whether you’re generating ballooned drawings or detailed reports, it ensures accuracy, efficiency, and compliance with industry standards. With its intuitive interface and seamless integration with SOLIDWORKS and PDFs, you can quickly extract critical dimensions and create first-article inspection (FAI) reports in minutes. Improve quality control, boost productivity, and deliver flawless products with confidence.
The SOLIDWORKS Inspection Add-in seamlessly integrates with SOLIDWORKS, allowing you to create ballooned inspection drawings and reports directly within your design environment. It automates the extraction of critical dimensions, minimizing manual work and reducing errors.
- Advantages of SOLIDWORKS Inspection Add-In
- Seamless integration and simple workflow
- Automate drawing and report creation process
- Handle revision effortlessly
- Eliminate errors
- Reduce time to market
- Export project to standalone application
Let’s get started with effortless SOLIDWORKS Inspection Add-In:
Open your SOLIDWORKS drawing for which you need to create an inspection report.
Start by clicking ‘New Inspection Project‘ to begin creating your quality inspection document. This will bring up the available and customized templates for your inspection report.
SOLIDWORKS Inspection offers a variety of templates to streamline your inspection report creation. You can choose from standard templates for quick and consistent reporting or customized templates tailored to your company’s specific requirements.
The software supports ANSI and ISO-compliant templates, ensuring adherence to industry standards. Excel-based templates allow easy sharing and editing, while ballooned drawing templates help create clear, visual inspection documents. Selecting the right template ensures accuracy, efficiency, and compliance, making your quality control process seamless and reliable.
Next, link the inspection report properties to the part’s custom properties to ensure accurate and consistent data mapping. Just double click the Custom Property and it will be linked to the Inspection Report.
When you click the Next arrow in the wizard, you will be taken to the Extraction Settings, where you can customize the options based on your inspection document requirements. You can choose to extract only inspection dimensions or include all basic dimensions as needed. Additionally, you have the flexibility to include GD&T, Surface Finishes, and Hole Callouts that are already present in the drawing, ensuring a comprehensive inspection report tailored to your production needs.
Once you click OK in the wizard, SOLIDWORKS Inspection will automatically balloon the dimensions and notes based on the selections made in the Extraction Settings page. This ensures that all critical inspection elements are clearly marked, streamlining the quality control process and reducing manual effort.
Further, if you want to highlight any dimension as a Key Dimension, you can do so by selecting the dimension and editing its properties as shown in Fig 7. You can also assign a different shape for Key Dimensions to make them stand out in the inspection report. Additionally, various methods and operations options are available, allowing you to customize how inspection data is presented. Selecting the appropriate options ensure that critical information is clearly highlighted, improving accuracy and efficiency in the quality inspection process.
Apart from this, there are some default options available under Inspection Methods, Vendors, and Operations that you can select from. To further simplify the process, SOLIDWORKS Inspection allows you to edit and customize these lists without modifying the templates. This flexibility helps streamline your workflow, making the inspection process faster and more efficient by reducing the need for manual edits.
Once all the Balloons, Key Dimensions, Notes, and GD&T are finalized, you are ready to create your Final Inspection Report. To do this, select one of the export options available in SOLIDWORKS Inspection. You can generate reports in Excel format for easy data handling or export a ballooned PDF drawing for a clear visual reference. Choosing the right export format ensures a smooth and efficient inspection documentation process.
SOLIDWORKS Inspection provides color-coded results to help you quickly analyze inspection data and identify deviations. Dimensions that meet the specified tolerances are highlighted in Green, while those that exceed limits are marked in Red, making it easy to spot non-conformities. Yellow indicates dimensions that are close to the tolerance limits, allowing for proactive adjustments. This visual feedback simplifies quality control, ensuring faster decision-making and improved accuracy in the inspection process.
SOLIDWORKS Inspection allows you to import Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM) results, enabling seamless comparison between measured values and nominal dimensions. This helps in quickly identifying discrepancies and ensuring compliance with quality standards. Once imported, the CMM data is automatically mapped to the corresponding inspection report, with color-coded feedback highlighting Pass/Fail conditions. This integration enhances accuracy, reduces manual data entry, and streamlines the inspection workflow.
The Template Editor in SOLIDWORKS Inspection allows you to customize inspection report templates to match your company’s specific requirements. With this tool, you can modify headers, footers, logos, fonts, and column layouts to create professional and standardized reports. It also enables you to add or remove fields, ensuring that the generated reports align with industry standards such as ANSI and ISO. By using the Template Editor, you can streamline your workflow and maintain consistency across all inspection documents without manually adjusting each report.
SOLIDWORKS Inspection simplifies and automates the inspection process, reducing manual effort and ensuring accuracy in every report. From ballooned drawings to CMM data import and customizable templates, it offers a complete solution for quality control. Start leveraging these powerful tools today and enhance efficiency, consistency, and compliance in your inspection workflow!
Guest Post/Tutorial by Best Engineering Aids and Consultancies Pvt. Ltd. (BEACON India) Author – Mr. Ronak Kamani
To know more details, please reach out to BEACON India at: Phone: +91 7406663589
Email ID: info@beacon-india.com
Website: http://beacon-india.com
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