I do a lot of enclosure design in plastics and one of the challenges of this is to design several versions of the enclosure in a very short space of time whilst showing alternatives for layouts of pcbs, batteries, displays, switches etc. A lot of the time the electronics designers need to get feedback from me before they can finish the design process for the pcbs and certifications.

One of the issues I have with doing everything inside SolidWorks is that the interface is just so clunky for manipulating parts in a conceptual manner. It is fine once you know exactly what you want but for thinking.....

My workflow at the moment is to model up the various PCBs and components (either from stock models or from scratch as freqently the enclosure needs designing before the pcb design is finalised so all I am interested in is the bounding box for the pcb and parts), then to arrange them and then design an outside surface for the package.

By far the trickiest part of this in SW is the arranging of the parts. For reasons of speed and ease I use part environments with multi bodies and import the various components as parts. And therein lies the problem. All I want to do is just drag the parts around, rotate them, line them upetc. Yes I can use the translate and mate tools but these are very very clunky compared to those in the assembly environment (why!!).

So how do others do it. What issues do you face. Do you agree that parts handling like above is slow and tedious. How about a history free translate? Am I missing a trick or two (probably).