Cadshift

You have an assembly with 40 sheet metal parts and 15 structural components. You need STEP files for each part for your supplier, and DXF flat patterns for your laser subcontractor. SolidWorks has no built-in “batch export as individual STEP/DXF files” command. You have two approaches: the system options SaveAs at the assembly level, or a macro that loops over components with OpenDoc6 and SaveAs. They produce different outputs and serve different use cases. ...

You reference a display state in a drawing view. A component in that display state is hidden. You right-click the view, go to Properties > Hide/Show Components, and try to show the component. Nothing happens. You try Show Component from the FeatureManager. Still nothing. The drawing view ignores you. This is by design, and it got stricter in SolidWorks 2026. The Visibility Hierarchy SolidWorks has two separate mechanisms for hiding and showing components in a drawing view. Engineers frequently run into problems because they assume these mechanisms are equivalent, or that one overrides the other in a predictable direction. They are not equivalent. ...

If you’ve tried to get a flat pattern from a cylindrical collar in SolidWorks, you’ve hit this wall: the Sheet Metal toolbar’s normal workflow assumes you start flat and bend up. A cylinder was never flat. SolidWorks has no direct “unroll cylinder” command, and if you try to use the Convert to Sheet Metal tool on a solid cylinder, it either rejects the geometry or produces a body with wrong thickness. ...

SolidWorks Simulation studies fail in predictable ways. Not at solve time — failure is obvious then. They fail quietly during setup, producing results that look plausible but reflect a model that doesn’t match what you assembled. Bolt connectors that don’t attach. Contact sets that miss a mating pair. A material assigned as 1060 Alloy because the template default was never changed. These issues are systematic. The same five checks catch them before the solver runs and before you hand results to a reviewer who will find them the hard way. ...

“SolidWorks automation” covers four distinct things that are often treated as interchangeable. They aren’t. A VBA macro that exports DXF files is automation. So is a Task Scheduler job that runs every night. So is a PDM Dispatch script that triggers on a workflow transition. So is a C# COM add-in with a custom Property Manager Page. Each approach has a specific setup cost, maintenance burden, and capability ceiling. Picking the wrong one for a given workflow creates either an over-engineered solution or one that fails the moment requirements change. This guide maps the decision. ...

SolidWorks exports flat patterns correctly. Nesting software imports DXF correctly. The problem is that what SolidWorks produces by default and what nesting software expects are often misaligned — and the failures are silent. Profiles import with no errors but cut the wrong features. Bend lines disappear. Splines approximate differently on each machine. Scale is off by 25.4×. This post covers the specific mismatch between SolidWorks DXF output and what ProNest, SigmaNEST, Lantek, and similar nesting tools expect, and the exact export configuration changes that fix it. ...

Most engineering teams hit the same wall at 3-5 people: the shared drive workflow stops working. Parts go missing, assemblies open with suppressed components, two people overwrite the same file on the same day, and nobody can tell what changed between Tuesday and Thursday. The standard advice — “use cloud sync” or “put it on Git” — misses the specific ways SolidWorks assemblies break under each of these systems. This post covers the actual failure modes of OneDrive, Google Drive, and Git-LFS for SolidWorks teams, and the specific differences in SolidWorks PDM Standard vs. Professional that matter for distributed workflows. ...

Safe Software’s partial acquisition by a private equity firm in early 2024 triggered price increases that blindsided teams that had built their GIS infrastructure around FME. Users in the community forums reported annual maintenance increases ranging from substantial to a 400% jump for some license tiers. The reaction was predictable: teams that could absorb the cost renewed; teams that couldn’t started auditing what FME was actually doing for them. What most found: the majority of their FME usage was format translation and straightforward transformation chains — work that GDAL, Python, and QGIS can handle without a license fee. The minority was complex branching pipelines and proprietary format readers that have no drop-in replacement. ...

Your tube bender needs one number before they can key anything into the CNC machine: the developed length, also called the cut length — the stock length of straight tube that goes in and produces your bent part when it comes out. Give them the wrong number and you are either scrapping material or re-cutting after the fact. SolidWorks weldments give you a length. The question is what that length actually represents, and when it matches what the bender needs. ...

Every SolidWorks tutorial on flat pattern views shows the same thing: open a sheet metal part, drag the flat pattern from the View Palette into a drawing. That works perfectly when you have one part and one drawing. It doesn’t help when you have an assembly with twelve sheet metal components and you need all the flat patterns in a single drawing document. The assembly case has two complications that the single-part case doesn’t. First, the View Palette shows assembly-level views, not individual part views — so the flat pattern doesn’t appear there. Second, when you insert from the assembly, SolidWorks shows views relative to the assembly coordinate system, not the part’s sheet metal orientation. Knowing which insert path to use for each scenario saves the frustration of inserting views that display the wrong orientation or can’t locate the flat pattern at all. ...