Hi,

First off I have to say I love solidworks and love working with it! Second routing is driving me crazy!

I am having a hard time with Solidworks Routing 2010. I am looking for books or anything that will teach me how to use it. In all the searches that I have done I have noticed that all the improvements happened in 2011 but I do not have the authority to upgrade at work.

I have noticed that if i put a flange to an item (say fixed valve), the flange one day will try to fly away from its mates. Just entering the model can cause the routes to misbehave. My fix is to not save the model, turn solidworks off, then open the route only (which should go back to normal) and delete all the mates. Then i go back in the main model and reattach the mates and it works fine.

If i try to mess with the route or "save" the model, i will be stuck trying to clean up problems within the route that is misbehaving. If this happens I have gotten to the point where i just delete the whole route as it is easier to remake the whole route than to fix it.

I have also noticed that its not good to have a route attached/mated to many different places. If it is not strait pretend that it is. Just like the free tutorials on the web they only have one mostly strait route/path from point A to B. Sadly I am always told to make routes with more than one place to go. My fix is to attach the flanges to all the places the route needs to go. As soon as the part is made I go in and delete all the secondary mates that show up at the bottom above Route1. Then I will put in Dimensions to lock the route from moving, which happens just for fun. I will go into the assembly and mate it as a ridged part. But even that gets messy so i will mate only one flange. I will also do a parallel "top" to "top of route" mate to make sure the route doesn't rotate.

Lately It is "cool" to show 1/8 gapes between everything on a piping route. I understand it makes the fab's job easy as they don't have to think about subtracting 1/8ths off every end of pipe for welding; or that Gaskets take up room. I excepted the task and started putting in gaps. It was a feat figuring out how to get the little gaps in there! I also had to give up on putting gaps between pipe and fittings as the whole pipe disappeared. I basically made a washer sized pipe then turned the line to a construction line.

Between fittings this works... sort of. The routes don't like to be misused and i get a lot of relations problems. The ones I see the most are: say I have a strait pipe line in the horizontal and X axis, then I change directions and stay horizontal but down the Z axis. They are connected by flanges both sides and attached to where they need to be. yay done

The next day I get into the model to make line 2 but I get a relations error saying that Z axis is red and bad. Why is it bad? I tell myself. I wish i could reproduce these problems but they seem to just "happen". Well like any modeling user, I delete the relation. Z then flies around and jets out at a weird angle. Z also says bad things to me everytime I try to make it go back. Yes Z is stubborn. I quickly give up and delete Z and make a new one which works just fine.

I am welcome to answers that solve these problems and any others you can let me in on. As well as work arounds that get the job done.

Also I was trying to find these questions on the forum but I easily get turned around. Sorry if there is a forum just like this one.

Thank you!!!!