SolidWorks Weldments

Here's a Rendering of my latest project, a giant Weldment. 658 bodies, over 5 tons of steel. My previous project to this was a Weldment too.

In general Weldments work great. The creation of Cut List Drawings is slick and useful. However, I've run into a few minor glitches, here's two:

1. Custom Weldment Profiles: if you create your own and fail to send them to the person receiving the files, they (the receiver) may see the Cut List Tables hosed. This is intermittent in 2007/2008, I haven't tried it in 2009 yet.

2. I can't successfully Mirror a complex Weldment Part. The Cut List on the Mirrored Part is hosed. Again, I haven't tried this in 2009 yet.

What's your experience with SolidWorks Weldments?

Cheers,
Devon T. Sowell
http://www.3-ddesignsolutions.com

Comments

[John Bell]

Got it!

The answer to the mirrored weldment cut list issue is simple... you need to turn the mirror part into a weldment!

Insert > Weldments > Weldment

your solid bodies will magically turn into a cut list.

[Ryan]

I realize I am about 6 months behind on this conversation but that is, unfortunately, nothing new for me. After much frustration I have found that the properties for the cut list item in the mirrored weldment will populate correctly if you make sure that the Cut-List-Item#'s are identical between the original and the mirror part. This, of course, rarely happens first time since most original part cut lists have gone through a few iterations and the mirrored part cut list will come in 1-however many items are in your part.

[Devon T. Sowell]

Hello Bernard-

Good idea, I'll try that.

Thanks,
Devon

[Bernard Julien]

A possible solution for the mirror weldment problem, is to use a part template that already contains a weldment feature as start part for the mirror operation. It seems that this way the custom properties are already defined and fill up nicely.

To make the start part, open a suitable part template, select insert: weldment, then save the template. Use this to createthe mirror.

[Devon T. Sowell]

Hello Gopal-

Thank you for your comments. I still enjoy reading your blog.

Devon

[Gopal Shenoy]

Devon,
Nice looking weldment there. I still get an emotional paycheck seeing such work because I was responsible for design of a lot of the weldment functionality while I was at SolidWorks (yes, I am patting my own back :-)) - but I have always been amazed by what designers like you do with the functionality. BTW, I am not in anyway responsible for any of those bugs ;-)

[Devon T. Sowell]

Hi Joel-

If you send me some examples, I'll post this problem in another blog post.

I also have some on-line storage if the file is too big to e-mail.

Devon

dtsowell@3-ddesignsolutions.com

[Joel Johnson]

I was less than thrilled to learn from SW that what I thought was a bug is a new feature. I do lots of stucture with steel tubing. When butting two pieces of steel tubing to make a T, if I want to simulate the weld where the straight side meets the curved edge, I used end trim with a body doing the trim. Now the trimmed piece is trimmed as if a face trim was used.

In that SW hasn't figured out how to weld a curve surface, I don't see a solution. I used this feature to do FEA study of the joint.

[Devon Sowell]

Hi Justin-

Excellent! Thanks for sharing this. I'll try this over the weekend.

Great discussion, so far. Let's hear more about Weldments, please.

Devon

[Justin Burton]

Hi Devon,

I didn't realise this was the case with mirroring a weldment and will ask the question why you cannot create a mirrored part with cut list in tact!

I did however find a work around... at the moment I am not quite sure why this works...

-Create your weldment and update the cutlist
-right click on the cutlist and select insert into new part (this must do something with the pofile info and add it as a property)
-in the new part click the weldmet icon and then update the newly created cutlist
-now pick a face to mirror about and use insert/mirror part
-on the mirrored version click the weldment icon and update the cutlist
-if you check the properties of the cutlist folder you will see that each folder now has all the weldment properties you need!!

This is obviously not perfect and will require the creation of a secondary part but it will however get you a mirrored weldment quite quickly.

Thanks,
Justin

[Devon Sowell]

Hello Adrian-

Yes, Ive seen this behavior too. Any chance you saved these Registry settings?

I haven't seen this. All my Weldment Profiles , standard and custom can be used in 2008.

Thanks for sharing your information.

Any others?

Devon

[Devon Sowell]

Hi Steve-

Yeah, it looks strong enough to hold a raptor.

Devon

[Adrian Dunevein]

Hi Devon;

Thats an impressive weldment.

I use weldments constantly, not quite as fancy as your though, and have noticed a couple of issues

For 2008 I had to get my VAR's help with the standard ISO/ANSI steel shapes. 2007 worked fine but 2008 required the VAR to make changes to the registry to allow me to add custom descriptions in the weldment cut list. I would get an error message previously saying I could only open sldlfp profiles read only. Apparently this is a known bug.

The same problem occurred on both my Vista laptop and my XP desktop machines.

I was also reading through the 2008 library features help and noticed it says that you cant save custom profiles as sldlfp library features in weldments anymore. I was able to copy my 2007 custom libraries in however.

[Steve Calvert]

Neat looking cage you have there, Devon. Is it for Jurasic Park IV?

Steve