SOLIDWORKS Sheet Metal
Sheet Metal Tips and Tricks from Javelin’s Certified Experts
What is a complementary angle? What am I referring to with changing the bend note angle to be complementary? Unfortunately, this won’t mean that your flat patterns will praise how great of a designer you are, but it certainly could help impress the manufacturing department! Check out the image below describing the difference between the…
SOLIDWORKS Indented BOM with Single Body Sheet Metal Part
When you create a SOLIDWORKS Indented BOM from an assembly that contains sheet metal or weldment parts it will add further indented rows with the cutlist information. You have the option to show the ‘Detailed cut list’ in the Indented BOM. For weldment files, deselecting the ‘Detailed cut list’ option will show the total length…
Practical Values for approximating “Zero Radius” bends in SOLIDWORKS
I am as sure as the words posted here that every sheet metal designer has been asked to fudge some values to represent a “SOLIDWORKS Zero Radius” bend or a “SOLIDWORKS Sharp Corner” at some point along the way. As it turns out there is a procedure for ensuring sharp corners in SOLIDWORKS, however it…
A costly part of manufacturing is creating the fixtures that are used to hold the parts in position during fabrication. That is why many designers are now turning to self-fixturing design technique to reduce the assembly and setup costs in the manufacturing process. In this technique the assembly components will be held together without the…
SOLIDWORKS Forming Tools are found in the Design Library and are used to form sheet metal parts. In the following image, you can see how a forming tool is dragged from the Design Library onto the sheet metal model to form the part. From time to time a customer will contact us to ask why…
When creating cut-extrudes on sheet metal models, it is recommended to choose the Normal Cut option under cut-extrude properties. What if a cut has already been made on a sheet metal and it is not normal? It could even be made by cut-loft feature. In SOLIDWORKS 2018, a new feature has been added to the…
SOLIDWORKS Sheet Metal includes a Sketch Transformation folder in the Flat Pattern feature when a sketch is added to a face that is not the fixed face (i.e. a face that moves when the piece is flattened). Within this folder is a derived sketch of the original so it stays on the face as it…
Bend Allowance, Bend Deduction and K-Factor Tables in SOLIDWORKS
In this series of blog posts it was discussed what different terms like Bend Allowance, Bend Deduction and K-Factor mean and how we can calculate them for a specific sheet. You can read the previous post: What are Bend Allowance, Bend Deduction and K-Factor? And the post that explains how to calculate them here. In this post…
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