AWM Sniper Rifle Design in Solidworks

Nice change of pace to see edge cases treated like first-class citizens instead of footnotes, especially for a beginner/intermediate Solidworks track. The moment that stuck was the section on the bolt lug geometry where he intentionally breaks the fillet, runs interference, then walks back tolerances; that’s the kind of thing that shows up later in prod and costs a PR. I’ve shipped CAD that looked fine in a repo but blew up at assembly, so the emphasis on mates failing felt real. The pacing mostly worked, though I wasn’t sold on how quickly configs were introduced; a bit more time on why one config beats another would help. still, the way he frames failure modes and stress paths maps cleanly to how I think about arch and CI checks in infra, even if you’re not building rifles. That framing alone made the time worthwhile between meetings.

Coming from software, this course nudged me to rethink a few legacy CAD habits the way refactoring does for old repos. The moment that stuck was Chapter 3’s bolt head lug layout, where the sketch constraints and pattern order clicked like arch decisions in a PR; it’s not flashy, but it prevents downstream pain. I wasn't sold on the pacing early on and wished there was a bit more on tolerance stack-ups, maybe closer to aerospace norms. it's helped tighten the words we use in design reviews so fewer sketches get bikeshedded.

Not padded. Patterns from module one were already useful.