Lightning is a great tool for us that also works great in combination with Enterprise PDM. Placing fasteners is a piece of cake now.
Jeroen Eijsink - Mechanical engineer - Dynobend
1: Click Add Fastener in the Lightning toolbar
2: Select a type, size and material
3: Drag the file into your assembly
We help you extract sizes and materials from your existing fastener library, store this info in our database and make it searchable. You need to do this only once.
Once your selection is complete, use one of the buttons to drag the part file directly into your assembly. If the part has mate references, it snaps in place.
Lightning has a user-friendly filter that lets you select a fastener type, size, material and coating. If you pre-select a hole, we select the right bolt diameter.
After you add the file, we do our magic. Lightning can add a washer under your bolts and nuts. You can even select your preferred washer. It is awesome.
If your parts have mate references, SOLIDWORKS automatically adds mates when you drag a part into the assembly. We use these mates to add washers + patterns.
Lightning can even add a pattern automatically. We highlight the first hole in a hole wizard feature. Just drag the bolt onto that hole and we do the rest.
We are on a mission to improve working with fasteners in SOLIDWORKS.
We built the first version of Lightning from home during the first lockdown of 2020. After that, we made Lightning freely available for a beta period. We received amazing feedback and released six updates with improvements.
We took Lightning out of beta in February of 2021 and added the product to our webshop. We kept prices low so that every frustrated SOLIDWORKS user can upgrade their fastener experience.
If you still have any feedback, please let us know! We built a feedback form right into the product. Or email us at [email protected].
Activate one PC per license
A great default
Support via phone and email
Floating licenses
Not locked to a PC
Support via phone and email
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Lightning is an add-in for SOLIDWORKS 2019 and newer. Its toolbar is visible for assemblies. You can always access your settings through the Tools menu.
Lightning should be compatible with all SOLIDWORKS parts. We are not a fan of the Toolbox though, so we built our own fastener library.
Lightning is heavily optimized for metric fastener sizes. We'd love to support the US with imperial sizes, but it will take a major rewrite to get there. We currently have no timeline for this addition yet.
It takes some time to extract data from your fasteners and put it into our database.
Depending on how consistent your filenames and configuration names are, it usually takes 10 minutes to 1 hour to set up properly. We can also do this for you.
You only need to enter this data once and you can share the resulting database with your colleagues.
Absolutely!
Lightning checks for updates every few days and notifies you when it finds one. You can then decide when you want to install the update.