Found a bug with Solid Works 2010

For 90% of my product design, I use Solid Works 2010 at Pillar Product Design. It is an amazing software 3D CAD package that I have been using for nearly 10+ years. They radically changed the layout about every 5 years to keep things interesting. I recently needed to scale a 3D assembly and output an .stl file for a prototype for a client. Solid Works would not allow me to do this with-out going thru a long and confusing process. If it was not for the quality assistance of the Hawkridge technical help, I would have been spinning my wheels for sometime. I guess the annual maintenance fee is worth something.

So this is the bug that I discovered, and I hope that this blog will assist other users in the future. So if you want to scale and output and assembly file to an .stl this is the steps:
1) open the assembly file.
2) save it as a .prt file, give it a unique name so you don’t modify your original.
3) check the geometry to save check boxes at the bottom and check all components
4) Save file.
5) Close assembly
6) Open .prt file
7) hit the scale icon or insert, feature, scale
8) Open the solid bodies folder
9) highlight all the solid bodies to be scaled
10) add your scale factor
11) select scale around origin
12) hit the green check
13) file save as .stl

It sounds like this has been an issue for Solidworks for sometime and they are supposedly fixing this bug and making a simpler work around for 2011. At least that is what the technical support guy communicated to me.