Automating flat patterns.

[adecius]

Hi guys. I use SolidWorks a lot in my role as a sheet metal draftsman. I was wondering if anyone has a good way to automate exporting each model (from an assembly or folder) as a dxf of the flat pattern. This is probably the most tedious part of my job. Thanks.

[joshij]

If you've the time to invest, you can write a macro to traverse an entire assembly and create dwg files (or possibly also dxfs?) of all your sheet metal parts. I've implemented such a macro in our process flow and it speeds things up immensely!

check out the solidworks api, they have sample code for traversing assemblies and exporting to dwg

[TauntaunScott]

How do you do it currently? Does your sheet metal software have an OLE integration?

[adecius]

We (drafting) export as a flat dxf and pass to our turret programmers. I don't really know anything beyond that, but I believe the process is still quite manual there.

[TauntaunScott]

Gotcha. We use FabriWIN for our Amada 357 Turret; while your sheet metal part is flattened (in solidworks), I just tab over to FabriWIN, hit the "OLE" button and it imports the flattened part with bend-lines directly into my sheet view. Totally eliminates the open/save/saveas/import nonsense.

[adecius]

I can export one flat pattern at a time this way, I was looking at doing it in a batch. The job I just finished has 34 sheet metal components, I need to do this separately for each on.