- SolidWorks has a full suite of sheet metal tools
and they're very powerful.
And in this release of SolidWorks
they've made some great improvements to them.
Now we don't have time to go
through all the sheet metal tools in this course.
This is just an essentials course
is getting up to speed and using the software.
Sheet metal is a little bit more specialized
and if you're using it, it's great.
If otherwise it's, you know, maybe not being used.
So we do have some courses
on the library on using SolidWork sheet metal that goes
into a lot more depth, but right now I just
want to keep you a quick overview of some of those tools
so you're aware of where they are.
And if you want to dive into a little further
you can take one of my other courses
on Solidwork sheet metal, but basically here
you just need any type of a sketch like this one here.
I've got it done.
Sketch number one, it's on the front plane.
And then you have to turn on the sheet metal tools.
If you don't seem up here as a tab,
right click on any one of these tabs here,
come over here to tabs
and make sure you've got sheet metal turned on.
Then you have a little sheet metal tab.
To start off any sheet metal part,
you basically just want to start
with this called this thing called base flange and tabs.
Click on that.
It's very similar to what you'd see in an extrude
but instead of having and enclosed boundary,
you've got an open boundary like this one here.
Click on the tool there, which is the base flange.
And notice I can type in a value,
I'm going to type in three inches here
and I'm going to make it instead going blind,
I'm going to go mid-plane so it's going to go both directions.
Again this is very similar
to the extrude command we already learned about.
You can then define what the thickness and the materials,
what the bend radius's are.
The bend allowance you can be diving there a little deeper.
And again, we cover all this in my sheet metal course
but I want to point
out that you can do all these adjustments here
when you're creating the part originally.
And then once you've created the part as a sheet metal part
then these values stay there with the sheet metal part
for all the other features you're going to add to it.
Click OK and there's my sheet metal part.
Now if you want to do something
like an edge flange would bend something down.
So click over here.
I can say, "Hey, I want to choose an edge.
"Like maybe this one right over here."
It's going to go ahead
and just bend that down and create that flange.
Pretty straightforward and simple, right?
We also the ability to create a flange on adjacent faces
and move that down and I can also choose other edges, right,
I can choose a bunch of edges at the same time.
And this is actually new with this version of SolidWorks
is that ability to kind of go around this shape.
Now this is not an easy thing to do in sheet metal
in real life.
You can't really do this unless you've got some type
of a forming tool that will form this whole thing in here.
But SolidWorks does allow you
to create this type of flange now in sheet metal.
So, again click all those edges
you want to create an edge flange on,
click OK and it does bend it out there.
It says, "Hey, bend outside is allowed."
So telling you if there's issues right here,
so you can switch to different styles here.
And if you obviously can't do what you want to do
in the first time, click and change a different flans
position and click, okay.
And then you can see what happens there.
It push that flan to the outside
and everything's good to go.
So anyways, those are the basic tools you have available
on sheet metal.
You've got the base flange tab,
you've got convert to sheet metal,
so if you want to start the solid and then switch it
over to a sheet metal part, you can.
You can do a lofted band.
You've got the edge flange, miter flange, hems, jogs.
You got a whole bunch of things.
Pretty much anything you want to do in sheet metal
you can do it in SolidWorks sheet metal.
And again, if you haven't started looking at these tools
definitely take a look at my other courses
on who specifically focus on sheet metal for SolidWorks.
But that should give you a brief
overview of the tools that are available.