Toolbox is not a library

Somehow I’ve been blogging for about a year now and I haven’t yet written about Toolbox. It is a little dated at this point, but 3 years ago I wrote a white paper on Toolbox (obsolete)(follow Rules of Thumb link on left, and then More Toolbox, 3rd link down). A lot of this is at this point out of date. SolidWorks 2007 has fixed one of the most aggregious problems, that being Huge Screws, but only if the assembly is built in 2007 with the 2007 Toolbox parts and database.

Still, Toolbox remains a configurator application. It is NOT a library. By that I mean that it makes parts to order rather than having all the parts available all the time. This is in one sense one of its greatest strengths and in many senses its most fatal flaw.

I know it is possible to make Toolbox work. There are several scenarios under which it works well, most ideally when an individual user is not connected to the network and never sends SolidWorks assembly data to any other user.

In the end, my recommendation to most people is to create all the sizes you are going to need, then auto-create a design table and use that to populate the custom property data like descriptions, materials, etc, and then remove the parts from Toolbox altogether and turn Toolbox off.

I’d like to hear back from some of you. How have you solved your Toolbox problems? How have you made it work for your company’s needs? What are your remaining complaints? How would you like these issues to be solved? Sound off!