CSWA Requirements / Skills - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

- In preparation for taking the CSWA Exam, I want to go over a few other requirements. First off, the exam is three hours long. You don't need to take the entire time but they do allot you that much time. The minimum passing grade is 70%. And for some reason if you don't pass the exam, you're going to have to wait for another 30 days before taking it again. Once you do pass the exam, you're going to receive an electronic certificate. As well as your name will be listed in the Directory which is great for showing potential employers or just showing off to your friends. The topics we're going to be looking at here, and we want to make sure that we know very well, are these. First off, Sketch Entities. We want to make sure that we know how to create lines, rectangles, circles, tangent arcs. all different types of Sketch Entities, cold. We want to make sure we know those. They're simple. They're easy for us to use. Because we are going to be creating a lot of complicated sketches. So for some reason you don't know Sketch Entities like lines and circles and arcs, make sure you go back and review those. Centerlines are used extensively for laying out the geometry here. So make sure you fully understand how to draw Centerlines, they're just like regular lines but make sure you know the difference. Sketch tools - convert and offset and trim. We're going to use those a lot. Almost every single part I've seen on the exam uses some type of an offset or convert tool, so make sure you know those. Sketch relationship is also important. Boss and cut features, make sure you know how to do extrudes and revolve. Sweeps and lofts are also important. But I don't see quite as many of those on the exam. Fillets and chamfers, make sure you know how to use those. I see those almost used on every part. Linear and circular patterns, make sure you know those. Almost every exam I've seen uses some type of a pattern-type feature. You're going to create a hole and pattern around a circle or something like that. Dimensions, make sure you obviously know how to add dimensions to your parts and sketches. Feature conditions, make sure not only do you know Blind, but you want to know, Up to Feature, Up to Surface, Offset from Surface, things like that. So you know how to start and end each one of your Features. Now Mass properties and Center of Mass; Almost every single part inside of the exam is going to ask you to build a part and then weigh it. So number one, we have to make sure we've assigned the right material to that part. So that when we weigh it, it comes out correctly. And two, we want to make sure we know how to open up the Mass properties and get the correct values. Center of Mass is also used extensively so we're going to create an assembly. And then we're going to figure out where the Center of Mass is. So those two things are how we're going to answer almost every single question on the exam. Now using Equations is also very important. Most of the time they're going to give you values like a,b and c and tell you what those values are. If it's 100, 50 and 25 for instance. Those should be put in to an equation, so the next time I go and modify that part, which is generally what's going to happen, I'm going to go ahead and create a part, then I'm going to go ahead and modify it in the next question. So, make sure we're using Equations that you quickly switch between the different parts. Materials; make sure again we know how to assign materials so we're getting the right values. We want to build assemblies so we need to make sure we can insert components correctly to build those assemblies. And when we're creating mates, we want to make sure we know all the basic mates like coincident, parallel, perpendicular and especially angle. Angle is used almost on every single assembly I've seen. Reference geometry, make sure we know planes, axes and mate references, that's important. The Drawing views, I want to make sure, for one, I know how to draw parts. But number two, I want to know how to read a drawing. Make sure I'm getting the information out of that drawing so I can create the parts. And finally, Annotations. Now these are the key topics we're going to be going over in this course, and making sure that we know how to use all these things, and actually applying them in context to real parts we're going to be looking at. So these are topics we want to get started with now, Let's jump right in and get started.