I need help moving formats back and forth
Hello I recent got a intership drawing skeetmetal parts with solidworks yaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy... I have been hired to create drawings for a instruction manual. The company has many 2D files that they use for a plasma cutter. Instead of re drawing each and every part I want to take the 2D sketch from the dwg files and sketch them onto a plane in solid works. Anyone know how to do this?
1 Answer
1.) Open the dwg in solidworks: Choose 'All Files (*,*)' or 'DWG(.*dwg)' to see your 2D files. This opens the DXF/DWG Import Manager
2.) Check ☑ Import to a new part as:
☑ 2D sketch
click next
3.) Check the layers you need ( for files used by a plasma cutter it should all of them)
Choose your input data units (check this against the product after importing the dwg)
Check Add constraints (do this only if your dwg's are not from nested sheets, pieceparts are often rotated to use the stock sheet with as little waste as possible and you may end up adding unwanted constraints plus it adds a little time to the import)
click next
4.) Instead of clicking next proceed directly to 'Finish'
5.) SW opens a sketch on the front plane named 'Model' containing your entities - Marquee select the entities and hit 'make block' either from the pop-up menu or by RMB - hit OK
6.) You now have a block that won't nudge or drag geometry out of place - use relations and dims to position the block as needed. I close this sketch and work on a sketch on top of it ( I don't trust a sketch unless I've personally put into and constrained everything in it)
Give us a shout if you have any issues (also there's a way to schedule these so that your pc can do it while you're away)
