For engineers who already know the math—but still lose projects. For the last few years, I’ve been sharing technical guides here on Mechanical Design Handbook —how to size a motor, how to calculate fits, and (as you recently read) how to choose between timing belts and ball screws. But after 25 years in industrial automation, I realized something uncomfortable: Projects rarely fail because the math was wrong. They fail because: The client changed the scope three times in one week. A critical vendor lied about a shipping date (and no one verified it). The installation technician couldn’t fit a wrench into the gap we designed. University taught us the physics. It didn’t teach us the reality. That gap is why I wrote my new book, The Sheet Mechanic . This is not a textbook. It is a field manual for the messy, political, and chaotic space between the CAD model and the factory floor. It captures the systems I’ve used to survive industrial projec...
In a previous example , I showed how to control variables in a Solid Edge sketch using a direct link to an Excel spreadsheet. In this example, I am going to show how to use VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) in Excel to control the variables in a Solid Edge sketch directly via the API. Advertisement 1. Setup Excel VBA Create a new file in Microsoft Excel. Press Alt+F11 to enter the Microsoft Visual Basic window as shown below. Figure 1: The VBA Editor environment. Right-click in the Project Explorer on the new file name (in this example, Book2 ) > Insert > Module . 2. Add References To make Solid Edge type libraries available to the Visual Basic Object Browser, click References on the Tools menu (or Project menu depending on your version). On the References dialog box, select the Solid Edge libraries you want to access (specifically the Solid Edge Framework Type Library and Solid Edge Part Type Libr...