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Happy Halloween everyone! This week, we’re taking about the scariest thing of all: money.

The costing feature was first introduced in SolidWorks 2012 as a way to estimate the cost of machined and sheet metal parts. It used an extensive collection of information about the setup and execution time of each operation in a part, which is saved as a template. Over the next several years, many incremental improvements were made, including support for multibody parts, simplification of templates, better estimation methods, as well as the ability to create reports and costed BOMs. This year, however, the Costing tool has taken its biggest leap yet. There are now four additional manufacturing options available (for a total of six), which will allow you to estimate cost information for nearly any part you can imagine.

Honorable Mentions

Costing Sensors

SolidWorks 2015 includes costing variables in the Sensor tool. You can use costing sensors to track the cost of various aspects of your part, and SolidWorks can alert you when your cost has exceeded a certain threshold.





Sensors can be created through the Sensors Folder on the FeatureManager design tree or the Evaluate tab (see above). After selecting a Costing Data Sensor, you can choose to track Total Cost, Material Cost, or Manufacturing Cost. You can then tell SolidWorks to alert you then that cost is within a certain range of values (greater than, less than, between, etc.) This real-time alert can help you eliminate expensive features during development.

Winner

New Costing Manufacturing Processes

SolidWorks Costing now supports nearly every major manufacturing process for mechanical parts and assemblies, making it easier than ever to estimate your costs well before production.

Costing for 3D Printing

When expenses are tightly controlled, it may be necessary to save costs even on prototypes. To estimate the cost of a 3D printed part, SolidWorks analyzes the volume of the part for material cost, then estimates the time required to lay down 3D printing material (and even incorporates cool-down time between layers). For now, additional cost for support material must be added manually per part.

Costing for Castings

Castings are generally the most complex and hard-to-predict parts in a product. While SolidWorks bases casting estimations on simplistic variables, and can’t predict the cost of tools or machined features in a casting, this is a good first step, and I’m sure we’ll see further improvements in later years. To estimate casting costs, SolidWorks once again begins by analyzing the volume of the part, in order to calculate material cost. It then determines the time required to complete a cycle, including heating, injecting, cooling, and ejecting the part. Due to cost variance, you provide the cost of tooling (or the mold) directly. This can generally be obtained directly from the mold maker or casting vendor.

Costing for Plastic

Plastics are everywhere. They’re just as complex as castings, but far more pervasive. SolidWorks costs plastics in much the same way as castings, using material volume and cycle time to perform the estimations. However, SolidWorks adds another level of detail by allowing you to choose between a ho-runner and cold-runner mold system. Various settings and defaults are changed according to which mold system template is selected. Additionally, as with castings, the cost of the tool is input manually by the user.

Costing for Weldments

You can use SOLIDWORKS Costing to cost multibody weldments or single-body structural members. If the part contains a Structural Member

in the FeatureManager design tree, the Costing software will automatically cost the structural member as an extruded part. The cost is based on the length of each member, plus the presence of any weld beads.

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