How to speed up your 2D mirror in SOLIDWORKS sketches!

If you’ve mirrored sketch entities in SOLIDWORKS, you are probably familiar with the Mirror command.  In that operation, you specify a centerline of symmetry, and which entities get mirrored.  That’s a fair bit of mousing back and forth between the graphics area and the Mirror manager and carefully picking various sketch entities, and ensuring that the symmetry centerline goes into the correct field.

The Mirror manager

But did you know you can often skip most of that work and still get the mirror to complete, without using the Mirror manager?  Well, you can, and it’s dead simple!  Here’s how:

1. Set up your centerline of symmetry and sketch what you want to mirror.
2. Drag-select everything you want to mirror, including the centerline of symmetry.  Note: include only ONE centerline in the selection, otherwise this trick won’t work.  So if you have more than one centerline in the sketch, be sure to select the appropriate one (or de-select the ones you don’t want from the selection).
   

   Drag to select everything to be included in the mirror

3. Launch a Mirror from the Sketch commands.  Ta-daa!  That’s it!  Simple, eh?  And it didn’t even make you use the Mirror manager.  Woohoo!

All done!