SOLIDWORKS Costing for Casting, Plastic, 3D Printing, and Structural Members

SolidWorks 2015 has introduced new methods for SOLIDWORKS Costing.  You still have the options for Machining and Sheet Metal as before.  Now you can also cost: Casting, Plastic, 3D Printing and Structural Members.  Each of these types have templates where you can setup costs for different processes.

A useful functionality that was also added is the ability to use custom stock bodies for machining operations so you can calculate additional machining costs on existing models.  The stock body can be an existing configuration of the model, or another part file.  An example of when this is useful is for post-machining operations.  The ratchet below has two configurations showing the forged and machined versions.

With a simple Machining cost analysis, the stock piece will be a solid block placed around the entire model.

The Stock Body can now be changed to “Custom” and you can select a configuration or reference part.  Here we selected the “Forged” configuration.  Costs can be associated to the stock body based on existing costing analysis of the stock part, its mass and the material cost per mass, or manually entering a custom cost of the stock.  Here we have set the Custom Cost to $0 to show that the cost is purely based on the post-machining operations.