How to save preferred fasteners (common stock) in SOLIDWORKS

We are on a mission to improve working with fasteners in SOLIDWORKS. Our approach has two parts:

1. Fastener Models: our great fastener library with highly consistent, native SOLIDWORKS models, with data straight from the ISO and DIN standards.
2. Lightning: the add-in that makes it easy to find, add and replace fasteners.

Both can be used independently. But together, you can create magic. Today, we have a big Lightning update for you.

In this blog post, you’ll find

1. Store your preferred fasteners: Stock Levels
   1. Filtering by minimum stock level
   2. Stock levels in the settings
2. Create patterns using Lightweight components
3. Extract data from custom properties
4. Edit folder paths in the settings
5. Other improvements
6. Bug fixes
7. What’s next?
8. Start filtering today

1. Store your preferred fasteners: Stock Levels

Your workshop always has certain fasteners in stock, the American term for this is common stock. You want your engineers to use more of these fasteners to streamline production, minimize purchasing issues and minimize confusion during assembly.

You cannot store your preferred fasteners in SOLIDWORKS, but we have now added this feature to Lightning.

We call these groups of fasteners Stock Levels. Each stock level has a score, name, color and description. You can add or delete the default three stock levels and you can fully control their properties so they work perfectly for your company.

1.1. Filtering by minimum stock level

Once you have defined a few stock levels and assigned them to all fasteners, we make it easy to filter by stock level. When you add a fastener, you can select the minimum stock level score in the top-left corner:

You select the minimum stock level score of all visible fasteners with the top menu. The colored circles you see in the top row are the visible stock levels.

Then, on every level after that, we’ll show a colored circle that signifies the maximum score of all the fasteners that match that group. If you select a fastener type with a green dot, there will be at least one size with a green stock level in that group. By doing it this way, we try to guide you into using more green/preferred fasteners.

1.2. Preferred fasteners in the settings

When you enter the settings, you can choose a stock level for each folder, file or configuration. It may take a little work upfront to assign these, but you can always tweak the results later on.

To make it easier, we added a bunch of extra columns that you can use to filter by. Make sure to expand all rows first (there’s an Expand all button on the right), so all configuration values are visible first.

2. Create patterns using Lightweight components

Lightning is so powerful because it can add washers and patterns for you. We even help you find the perfect seed position for you so you can always create the perfect pattern.

As you can see below, we change the selected hole. This is the first hole in the pattern and the perfect seed.

But we received an issue when Lightning would not always add a pattern when the user asked it to. We found out that this happens when the part with holes is loaded as Lightweight.

So from now on, when you select a hole in a lightweight part to add fasteners to, we will fully resolve (aka load) that part so we can create the pattern you requested.

3. Extract data from custom properties

Every action becomes tedious if you have to do it 10,000 times. If you’re working with fasteners, that possibility is always lurking in the background.

Lightning needs to know the standard, diameter, length, etc of all your fasteners. To streamline that process, we can extract data from your filenames and configuration names.

But from now on, we can even read data from custom properties. This is very helpful when your filenames just have a number, for example. We can use file-level custom properties or per-configuration custom properties.

To create a pattern, just:

1. Open the settings and go to screen number four
2. Select a folder, file or configuration
3. Select Custom property (file) or Custom property (configuration)
4. Enter the name of the custom property
5. Create a pattern that matches the data in your property using the buttons below.
6. Click Apply pattern to selection to let us extract the data and store it for each fastener configuration.

4. Edit folder paths in the settings

Lightning stores the paths to all your files in its database. This made it hard to move your library because Lightning was still looking for the old folders.

To fix that, we added an Edit button to the second panel of the settings. The button lets you browse for the new location of any folder.

5. Other improvements

There are dozens of changes in this update. Some are visible, some are not:

1. We now show a more visible warning when your database file is read-only and cannot be changed in the settings.
2. We show a future version warning before you try (and fail) to add a file from a future SOLIDWORKS version to your assembly.
3. Simplified pattern panel in the settings. By adding four radio buttons for the source, we could remove an identical copy of this piece of the user interface. Plus, this made room for the list of previously used patterns.
4. Added more thumbnails to choose from.
5. Made opening the settings window much faster when you have lots of files in your database.

6. Bug fixes

We found and fixed quite a few bugs this time. Thanks to everyone for reporting them!

• Fixed the settings window not opening when files are stored on a network drive.
• Fixed replacing fasteners
• Fixed thumbnails for ISO 7380-2 torx
• Fixed missing headings in the Add Fastener window
• Fixed the sorting order of the available fastener types in the settings.

As always, please let us know when you think you found a bug. We respond quickly and generally fix it in the next version.

7. What’s next?

Adding stock levels wasn’t easy, it took dozens of attempts to make the user interface intuitive, simple to use and great to look at. For the next version, we are building one large feature: Support for multiple databases!

Besides that, we will be doing some serious maintenance. If we do it right, we can delete a lot of semi-duplicate code. After that, it’s time to add features again.

8. Start filtering today

Lightning makes working with fasteners fun again. You can add, edit and replace fasteners much faster with this affordable (€150 or €220 per year) add-in.

We have a 14-day free trial. The add-in contains a helpful getting started video and 100 free fastener samples. All features are available during the trial.