Hi Mark,

>....the company I work for mostly supplies spare
> parts for machinery used in the mining industry.

I feel MoI as a companion to Solidworks would work great for the mechanical engineering side of things, I use Siemens NX6 (Unigraphics) and importing models from MoI and back again works fine, not that I do it for work on a day to day basis, but what I have tried works just fine, actually if I have an assembly in MoI with each part named and export as step, NX converts the step file into individual parts (files) corresponding to their name and then assembles them as they were in MoI and shows up in the assembly tree, I'm not sure, but I think Solidworks would work the same way, you'll have to try it.

Also as you've already seen here Ralf showing off the mechanical work he does and it looks like MoI does a great job.

I think you'll just have to use it on some projects and work out a system between MoI, Solidworks and Autocad, on the plus side the boss doesn't have to fork out for another seat of Solidworks, and get almost the same work output if he did, with a sub $200 investment.

Hey Michael, do you need an Aussie agent, I sound like a rep ;)

Cheers