Model Mania is a fantastic way to hone, refine, and extend your CAD skills with SOLIDWORKS. In this example we look at the Model Mania Challenge from 2025. Let’s highlight some of the tips and tricks in this specific challenge that can really help you model quickly in your day to day CAD work. Here you’ll find the drawing for phase 1 and then the changes required for phase 2. If you want to follow along, the answers are shown at the end of the article.
1. Symmetry: This is a huge time savor if you recognize it. Symmetry allows you to use mirror at the sketch and feature level to help you save time by modeling just half of the features.
2. Dimensioning to tangency: this is a little-known tip that enables you to dimension to tangencies of curved features like arcs, circles, or the ends of slots (like in this example). The tip is to hold the shift key while you’re selecting the curved entity. The shift selection defines the tangent dimension. Just let go of the shift key to return to the default “center dimension.”
3. Contour Select: this incredibly powerful feature drives efficiency when creating features from sketches. It is the only way you can reuse sketch geometry without creating copies of it. In this Model Mania example it worked incredibly well to help minimize the number of sketches that needed to be created.
4. Extrude Options: Did you know you could change the option that defines the ending of an extrude? By default an extrude (boss or cut) will be blind meaning its defined as a length. But you can use other references. In this example it made sense to define it as a measurement from a surface like it was in the shop drawing.
5. Fillet Xpert: an incredibly time saving tool to help you add fillet to other edges. After your initial edge selection for a fillet, the Fillet Xpert tool bar pops up with intelligent selections. I recommend pausing and seeing if any of these work for you. As you see in the video, it works well some times and other times it doesn’t immediately work without a quick reorder.
6. Reorder: You can use the roll back bar or simply drag and drop features in the Feature Manager to help you reorder the way your geometry is created. In this example it was a huge time saver to reorder the final circular hole so we could use the Fillet Xpert feature to add fillets to every single edge in just one click.
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