Adjusting the Weight/Mass Accuracy in a SOLIDWORKS Drawing

In this article I’ll show how to change the numeric precision on the weight/mass linked annotation in a SOLIDWORKS drawing.

If you are anything like me, you might play this game when you’re bringing your groceries in from your car, the game is: trying to get all the bags inside the house in only one trip. Ever wonder how much weight you just carried? I’m always surprised how much I can carry with the motivation of not coming back outside in the dead of winter.

How does this relate to SOLIDWORKS? Well, I have my 10 pound dumbbell model in a drawing:

SOLIDWORKS Drawing with weight noted in the title block

But I want to show that it is actually only 10 pounds and not 10 plus many decimal points. The way SOLIDWORKS changes the decimal point precision is not intuitive with its terminology.

Weight custom property in my drawing sheet

Set the Document Units

Going into Tools > Options > Document Properties > Units, as shown below:

SOLIDWORKS Document Properties Units

Here we want to select Custom if not already there, this will unlock the greyed out area below.

The second section Mass/Section Properties is where the change happens.

Click on length and change the accuracy of the decimal point. In this case, length doesn’t mean unit distance but length of or amount of digits. Like I said, not really intuitive.

Make sure to do a rebuild to see the changes.

What I would suggest, if this is a commonality of many parts or assemblies, is to incorporate this into your template. To see how to create or change templates, please refer to our series of SOLIDWORKS Template Setup articles.

Maybe one day I will buy that grocery foldable cart to assist with the grocery trek, but for now I’ll stick to my game.