Interference Detection - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

- [Narrator] Interference detection is definitely one of the most valuable tools if you're working in an assembly with a lot of parts, especially if you've been making changes over time. Overlooking some small interference is a very, very common thing to do, and this tool is going to really save us a huge amount of time and money with a couple clicks. So here we go. Under the Evaluate tool bar, click on Interference Detection here. Click on that and we're looking at this assembly and all we have to really do here is click on Calculate and it's going to do everything for us. Now I can already see there's a couple of problems with this assembly. You see over here, this little bushing here is inside the part, looks like we're missing a hole here, so that's obviously the problem and it might be the same problem over here, but it's kind of hard to see, especially if you have this other part going directly through the part. So that might be an error that's easy to find, or maybe it's not, maybe it's kind of hidden inside your design under multiple layers and you're just not finding it. Or maybe you decided originally to put two in and then you decided you needed three and you added three to one component but you forgot to put the hole in the other component. They make it really easy to find those. Go ahead and click on Calculate. And it says hey, I've found a whole bunch of problems here and of course we were just talking about it says hey, these two components are interfering and you can see there's a lot of interference. The entire part is inside the other part, and like I said, if it was slightly below the surface, you might not even see that part inside there. So it's going to find it for us. Then I can click on the little dropdown next to it and it's going to show me which components are the ones who are interfering. So I can then click on those and edit those components as needed. I can also then just go down this list and just click on the individual interferences that I'm seeing. So parts like this, you're seeing an interference but we're actually intending these parts to interfere. This is a press fit. Notice it's a very, very small interference, it's only interfering by three tenths, so it's a press fit, and that's actually what we're looking for in this design. So that's good actually, we want to verify that we do have those press fits, and of course we could come up here and exclude those parts if we wanted to, if we just didn't want to see them, but it's nice to see that we do have a press fit and it is showing how much it's interfering by and that is about what we want. And it also gives you a great way to just look over your design and verify that all the press fits you're looking for are the right amount of press fit. As I come down the model again, I can just click on individual components and you can see where we're interfering and how much we're interfering by. These components really only have a few, actually maybe like a tenth of interference. So we're probably okay on those, those all look like pretty good interference fits and press fits. So that's about what we're looking for, the big change we need to make obviously is adding an additional hole here so we're not obviously having one part inside the other. As you slide down here, you can also look at component view if you wanted to, and then we have all these options which is pretty handy, so definitely look through those. Then at the very bottom, you can see and show how you want these components to show up in your screen. And click on Wireframes so you can just kind of see them. I can hide the components who are not part of that little grouping. I can make them transparent, or I can use the current view. So I like this one called Hidden, so you can just see who's interfering, and if you click on another one it just kind of highlights which components are the ones that are interfering and you can really see what's happening inside of your model. And again, you might have a couple, you might have hundreds in your design, and this is going to really allow you to kind of go in and double check everything and if there's interference fits or press fits, it's going to let you find them and check them. And if it's just a blatant oversight, obviously it's going to save you a lot of time and money versus making the parts and then finding that out down the road. So definitely use the interference tool, it's one of the best tools inside SOLIDWORKS to really evaluate an assembly, and I use it all the time.