Closing Corners like a Pro in SOLIDWORKS Sheet Metal

In this video and blog, we will dig into one of the most powerful tools in SOLIDWORKS Sheet Metal that allows you to close corners.

What do Advanced Surface Modeling and Sheet Metal have in common? For many of my clients – a lot! 

A couple of months ago I delivered a Training Assessment service to one of my favorite clients. 90% of components they model in SOLIDWORKS are sheet metal, so why was their power-user under the impression that she needed advanced surface modeling training?

Everything became clear during our one-on-one meeting (such meetings are key components of the Training Assessment service). She and her colleagues were spending a lot of time attempting to model real-life details on their sheet-metal parts like the one shown in (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Turns out the Sheet Metal environment has dedicated tools that can achieve the same result with one feature – the Close Corners command. While this team would have benefited from attending Surface Modeling for other use cases, the course they needed the most of the SOLIDWORKS Sheet Metal training.

That being said, there is one detail that is not properly explained anywhere in the help file, related to the order of selections to ensure a perfect close of the bend region.

When attempting to close a corner similar to the one shown in Figure 2, when defining the Close Corners features, it is critical to first select the face that is coplanar to the bend region (Figure 3)

The result is exactly what my client wanted (Figure 4).

Figure 4

Which shows one more time that “we do not know what we do not know”. Training Assessments are the best tools for making sure the training your company will take is 100% relevant to the needs of your users.

We are looking forward to spending some quality time with your users and assist you in tailoring their training program to maximize their productivity.