i'm curious if anyone out there is familiar with the program SolidWorks and if they use it for boar designing. i just accuired it from a friend and like to play around with it, but how to design a board is beyond me. could anyone throw some suggestions my way?

thanks,
.devin

I'we done it to all my boards (for fun). But I can not see any real use of it, unles you have CNC machine. Go thru online tutorial and tere should be no probs.

I hope it'll help.

devin, as it's name suggests solidworks: is a solids engineering package. it's not really ideally suited to board design, for which you'd likely be better off with a surfacing package, somehting like rhino, is easy to get a hold of, and has a more intuitive toolset for the kind of shapes you will likely be making.

you can use both for sure, but rhino will give you much more freedom in being able to adjust your shapes freeform once you have assembled a basic shape.

AFAIK, most production surfboard companies are using this ( http://www.shape3d.com/ ) or something like it. I know a couple kiteboard designers, and they're still designing my eye/hand, but I'd imagine alot of kiteboard design is done on some CAD app.

I've also tried using this ( http://www.freeship.org ) which is intended for boat/ship design, but I have been able to use it to start some basic shapes and then output the 3D file to another app.

For my designs in the past, I've done them entirely in 2D CAD (one template for the top view, one for the rocker line and another for a center profile). Not as sexy as doing it in 3D, but it works

Sq,

i was planning on using SolidWorks just because we also have copys of CosmosWorks and FlowWorks, so i could test out all the areas of flex/strain on the board and also see how water would flow off the bas shape. i'll definatley take a look at the online tutorials again. thanks for everyone's help.

.devin

devin,

there are basically two ways of designing boards in SolidWorks:

Solid method
1) Create your rocker curve then sweep a solid cross-section along it.
2) Create your board outline curve and cut through the solid yuo created in 1.
3) Either use fillets and chamfer for your edge profiles or sweep a cut around the edge..
This is the easiet method for simple board shapes...

Surfacing method
This is harder to describe but allows you to create some really complex geometries....

The advantage of using SolidWorks over Rhino is that it is fully parametric so you have more control over your curves... this can also be a disadvantage at the start of designing however...