Bracketage (rhymes with "garage") is the art of designing, making and installing brackets. Working mechanical engineers spend a significant amount of their careers designing ways to bracket objects onto each other.

This page is intended to support that important though unglamorous subject, which will be taught as a 3-session class. To view the EventBrite listing, please click here.

Solidworks Tutorials

Simple Angle Brace

Below is a set of tutorials showing basic use of Solidworks leading to sheet-metal bracket design and fabrication in the Metal Shop

Solidworks Tutorials

Tutorial 1	Tutorial 2a	Tutorial 2b
Beginner's Introduction	Designing a Bracket	Building the Bracket

Important Note

Solidworks need to be updated periodically. If a particular computer needs an update, this computer will fail to load Solidworks until it has been correctly updated by someone who has Admin privileges on the machine.

The dialog box signaling this problem is show below.

If you try to load Solidworks and you see this message, put a note on the bench with that machine and move on to another.

There is currently no organized system for reporting software issues, but people are alert to this problem and will act if notified.