Chapter 35
Creating Sheet Metal Drawings

After you create your sheet metal models, you will need to make drawings to use to get them manufactured. Fortunately, SolidWorks provides some nice tools to document, dimension, and annotate your parts in 2D.

Depending on whether your company does its own sheet metal manufacturing, you may or may not actually make flat pattern drawings. Many companies that use outside manufacturing for their sheet metal parts may just send their suppliers a drawing with views of a dimensioned part in the folded state. This is because the final formed dimensions are what you want the shop to be responsible for, and if they use different flat dimensions to achieve that, it doesn't really matter.

Many users may think that providing a fully dimensioned flat pattern is very valuable to the sheet metal shop. If your sheet metal shop is a professional outfit, they probably have their own software and their own way of doing things; in which case, a flat pattern is...