- [Narrator] The costing add-in for SolidWorks
is a great way to get some preliminary data
on how much your part is going to cost to build.
Under the Evaluate toolbar here,
over on the far right-hand side
you can see I have Costing, go ahead and fire that up.
You've got several different methods
we can build a part from, so in this case here,
I have machining, casting, injection molding in plastic,
or 3D printing, so in this case, I'm going to choose Machine.
Now I have a template that I'm going to be pulling data from,
as far as how much it cost to run certain processes,
different materials and such, so you can
add and modify that with this editor down here, I'm going to
go ahead and use the default one for right now, though.
Down here I'm going to go ahead and choose the materials,
so in this case I'm going to choose an aluminum alloy,
6061 looks good, currently that cost
is about 2.25 dollars per pound,
and you notice it gives me the weight of that part,
and if I come down here, I can adjust that stock
a little bit, if I want to choose, like,
a block or a plate or a cylinder, or something like that,
or some custom shape, you can do that as well.
And then I can add additional material,
right, 'cause you can't really make this part
exactly out of that perfect size material,
you got to have a little bit bigger,
so you can carve this out with a machine,
so if you're setting up a CNC machine,
you're generally going to be buying bar stock,
so in this case here, you can see X is 3.35, Y is 2.91.
So in Y, we might want to say, hey,
let's get some 3-inch bar stock,
that might make a good choice,
and as far as Z, we're at 1.57,
which is really not a very good size, right,
'cause it pushes us up to that next size,
so I have to buy an inch and three-quarter,
or even two inch, depending on the size.
So I might want to say input specific size,
and over here I might want to say,
this is going to be three inch, over here we're going to say,
this is going to be inch and three-quarter bar,
and if we can get it, otherwise it's going to be two inch,
and then my X dimension here, I'm going to be
cutting that out of bar, so I can cut that
to whatever length I want, so let's go ahead and just say
that's going to be 3.5 inches long.
So now you can see we've got a lot of material on the top,
on the bottom and the sides, and we're a little bit long,
so now we have a nice starting block to cut from,
and we'll have all nice machined edges
when we go ahead and actually make that part.
Now because of that, we are going to be buying
that big of a piece of material, and we're going to be
removing all this material here in the center,
so there's a lot of machining to remove all that material.
Alright, now we come down here to the bottom,
we can say the quantity of the parts
we're going to be making, 100 sounds good.
My shop rate, I'm going to overwrite that,
I'm going to say, maybe $75 per hour, and my markup or discount
may be on material, most shops charge about 20%,
so let's go ahead and put that in there.
Then come up here to the top and say Begin Cost Estimation.
Alright, this one says, the face cannot be used
to create the Sweep Feature due to geometry conditions.
And you got a couple errors happening here,
and then it's going to be updating the results.
So it's going to say, this part's going to cost us about $96,
and if there's something it can't do,
it's obviously going to let us know
what it can do and what it can't do.
So over here is Setup, it's got Setup operations,
it thinks it's got nine setup operations,
which might be a little bit too many.
Custom setups, no load and unload,
how many times it has to do that, you got all those.
Here's the milling operations and things,
so you have a right-hand side, left side, top side,
bottom face, near face, far face, and here's the volume.
These aren't really exactly what's going to happen
in the real world, I ran a machine shop for years,
I set this job up, and I don't see any more
than maybe three operations, right,
you're probably going to come in here from this side first,
you're going to machine all the material around,
go around the outside of the part,
you obviously have to put it up on edge,
and either do these holes here from this direction,
or go around and do these holes in this outside periphery
from this direction, and then you might
come over here and face off that back material,
and then clean this up, so you probably have
three operations, not seven operations,
and you definitely don't have eighteen operations,
but depending on the method you're using to make
these parts, you're going to probably have several operations,
and you can see what SolidWorks is estimating, at least,
and how much time is going to be involved
in each one of these operations.
So as you can see, this is clearly far from perfect,
but you are getting some data out of it,
and even if it's the wrong number,
you can at least look at the evaluation from job to job.
So if I make a change to this part,
instead of $96 it drops to $75, you can see
I've made an improvement in the design,
and that's really what you're looking for here.
And if you do want to get into that template,
you can edit some of those operations,
and kind of clean things up a little bit,
and that will affect this costing estimate
as you move up and down or change things.
Same thing over here, if I change
from maybe an aluminum to a steel,
what that's going to do to my part.
So I switch from aluminum to stainless steel,
and you can see how much it affects that price.
So of course, the material is a big component of that,
the manufacturing, and then of course, the markup,
so you're seeing what goes into this, and again,
it's not perfect, it's just estimating it for you,
but if you get the template dialed in pretty well,
off of a part you maybe already make, and you know
the cost of it, you can then dial those things in,
and then start getting some good data
from the costing tool inside of SolidWorks.