Smart Fasteners Overview
Smart Fasteners automatically adds fasteners to your
assembly if there is a hole, hole series, or pattern of holes, that is
sized to accept standard hardware. It uses the SolidWorks Toolbox library
of fasteners, which has a large variety of ANSI Inch, Metric and other
standard hardware. Smart Fasteners follows the Files
options in the SolidWorks Toolbox Toolbox
- User Settings dialog box to determine if fasteners are added
to an assembly as a configuration of an existing part or as a copy of
an existing part. For information about configuring Toolbox, see Toolbox Help.
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Assembly with various types of holes |
Assembly with Smart Fasteners |
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You must enable the SolidWorks Toolbox Browser to use Smart
Fasteners:
Click Tools, Add-ins. Select SolidWorks
Toolbox Browser. Click OK. |
To add Smart Fasteners to an assembly:
Click Smart Fasteners
(Assembly toolbar) or Insert,
Smart Fasteners.
Set options
in the PropertyManager.
Click 
.
To edit an existing Smart Fastener,
right-click it in the FeatureManager design tree and select Edit
Smart Fastener.
Holes for Smart Fasteners
Smart Fasteners adds fasteners to available hole features in assemblies.
The holes can be assembly or part features. You can add fasteners to specific
holes or patterns, faces or components, or to all available holes.
Smart Fasteners is feature-based. Fasteners are placed in Hole Wizard
holes, simple holes, and cylindrical cut features. Smart Fasteners does
not recognize holes in derived, mirrored, or imported bodies. If you extrude
a sketch of a rectangle with a circle in it as a base feature, Smart Fasteners
does not recognize the inside of the boss as a hole, because the cylinder
is not a separate feature. See Unsupported Hole Types for more
information on hole recognition.
Fasteners
Hole Wizard holes are fitted with matching bolts or screws. For other
types of holes, you can configure Smart Fasteners to add any type of bolt
or screw as a default. The fasteners are automatically mated to the holes
with concentric and coincident mates.
Hardware Stacks
Smart Fasteners can add nuts and washers to your fasteners.
Nuts
and washers
are automatically mated to the fastener with a concentric mate, and to
the fastening surface with a coincident mate.
Configurations
The added fasteners are fully parameterized parts. Each Smart Fastener
is shown in the FeatureManager design tree, and can be expanded to show
individual features. Smart Fasteners added to hole patterns use a fastener
pattern derived from the hole pattern. The fasteners are all the same
type and size, but you can use different configurations of the fastener in
the pattern. For example, you can make some bolts longer than others.
Editing
You can change your fasteners with the Edit
Smart Fasteners command. It is not
recommended to edit the individual parameters of a Toolbox part using
Edit Sketch or Edit
Feature. These functions do not update the Toolbox database.
Related Topics
Smart
Fasteners PropertyManager
Editing Smart Fasteners
Drag-and-Drop Editing
of Smart Fasteners