The West Michigan held its final meeting of 2008 on Tuesday, November 11, 2008 at the Colonial Clock Building in Zeeland, Michigan. We had 24 attendees (which was a little down from normal) at this meeting and those 24 generated a lot of discussion.

Shawn Wolters did a tremendous job with doing his own “What’s New in SolidWorks 2009″ presentation. He picked out the topics that he thought would cater most to the people in our user group and he hit it right on the spot. Before the meeting began Shawn was a little nervous about how long his presentation would take because he was counting on some discussion but that is something you don’t know if you will get or not. In the end I don’t believe Shawn even got through everything before the 2 ½ hours were up and it was time for us to wrap things up. Here are just a few of the things that Shawn touched on during his presentation.

• Sketch Tools Covered
  • Dimension input in sketches
  • Slot sketch tools
  • Stretch command
  • Negative values, 0 input for dimensions
• Instant3D additions
  • Extrude to cut extrude with drag
    • Negative values allowed
• Sheet Metal
  • Solid to sheet metal
• Sensors
  • Interference Detection
  • Mass Properties
• Weldments
  • Add gaps between Weldments
  • Weldment groups
  • Weldment caps
  • Weldment rebuild time faster with groups as opposed to single features
• Drafting standards
• Custom Property Builder
• SpeedPak
• Drawings
  • Quick view (right click, load sheet)

We also had a special guest attend this meeting (well all attendees were special but this one was extra special). Elton Smith, a SolidWorks employee who is based out of Canton, Michigan, happened to be in the West Michigan area on Tuesday and attended our meeting. Elton is the new Great Lakes Territorial Technical Manager for SolidWorks and is extremely smart when it comes to the software. He was able to answer a lot of the questions that were brought up throughout the meeting, do a couple of quick SolidWorks 2009 tutorials himself and jot down some questions that he couldn’t answer so that he can get answers from someone else. All in all it was absolutely great that Elton could make it and we hope that he can continue to attend upcoming meetings.

It was decided at the end of the meeting to do a follow up open floor discussion at our next WMSWUG meeting about SolidWorks 2009. This way hopefully everyone will have had some time to play around with 2009 and use it in production. So if you have any questions make sure you write them down and take them with you to the next meeting. Jason Raak will be doing the other presentation at this meeting. The title of his presentation is “The Ins & Outs of In Context Modeling”.

Here are the details for the next WMSWUG meeting. Make sure you mark it on your calendars TODAY:

• Date: January 13, 2009
• Location: TENTATIVELY @ the Colonial Clock Building again
• Time: 5:30pm – 8:30pm