Chapter 34
Using SolidWorks Sheet Metal Tools
SolidWorks contains two completely separate methods for working in sheet metal, and they both use regular SolidWorks parts (*.sldprt). In one method, you can use dedicated Sheet Metal features from the start, and in the other method, you build a part using thin features and other generic modeling tools, and then convert it to sheet metal so you can flatten it.
The reason for two methods is that the generic modeling method came first, and then SolidWorks introduced a more powerful set of dedicated Sheet Metal features. You can use these tools together or separately, and either way you get an accurately flattened part at the end. Situations where you might want to use one or the other are covered in this chapter.
Sheet metal tools don't always represent real-world sheet metal manufacturing processes 100 percent accurately, because some shapes that result from bending processes are too complex to easily represent in a CAD model. Sometimes...
