Fixing Linkages in Solidworks: A Lesson in Poor Design

Solidworks is a great 3D CAD program. However every engineer knows the pain of having to go back and change every little piece of a drawing, or a CAD file because the design was flawed from the beginning.

When trying to build the system of linkages, I realized my 3D models were far too small to be practical. Sensibly, I decided to scale everything, right?

Wrong. I wanted to scale everything by a factor of 3, so when I did, it completely backfired. I had used extruded cuts, and defined the holes for screws individually. When it scaled, the holes became 3 times the size...

Maybe using a global variable or something would have helped. The first hour was spent trying to fix the problem, although the fact that a SCALE command was used meant the original sketches were not the same size, and therefore trying to edit previous sketches was a nightmare.

I figured it would be better to just redo the whole thing.