Special purpose machinery or tools often require many fixings or fasteners that are standard off-the-shelf items. Of course, this isn't out of the scope of SOLIDWORKS to design and configure these components, but to save time, effort and duplication, SOLIDWORKS Toolbox offers thousands of predefined components, such as nuts, bolts, washers, bearings and retaining rings. These items are pre-configured to allow the use of the full range of sizes and styles required. The amount of components within the toolbox can sometimes be daunting, but rest assured, the toolbox can be customized to include only the items of interest, and of course, your own supplier or internal part numbers can be added. You will never need to modify your blue materials manually again. There are various ways of introducing SOLIDWORKS Toolbox components into your assembly. The most straightforward way is to simply drag and drop the required component onto the desired hole. To add some elements of automation to the assembly process, SOLIDWORKS Toolbox can either pattern components using hole wizard layouts, or use the pattern features, or pattern parts. SOLIDWORKS Toolbox also has the ability to automatically populate fasteners into a design based on holes that already exist. Automatically adding fasteners can save hours of tedious dragging and dropping. If a stack of fasteners are required, Toolbox Smart Fasteners can allow you to define a stack up that will respect the surrounding geometry. Toolbox can alter the fastener length and diameter due to a design change. In some cases, predefined holes are not specified earlier in the design. To add fasteners where holes don't yet exist is easy. The hole series functionality within SOLIDWORKS Toolbox is perfect for this situation. Hole series allows you to define holes and hole types through multiple components, all within a single environment. The individual holes are populated into their respective parts and the fastener or fasteners can also be added to the holes as they are created. Using one method or a mixture of methods that are offered by SOLIDWORKS Toolbox saves you time, effort and duplication. This will otherwise be unavoidable using traditional methods. For more information on SOLIDWORKS Toolbox and the range of other tools available inside SOLIDWORKS, be sure to get in touch.