Part VII: Working with Specialized Functionality
Notice that this time the part comes up with a feature error. The error is on a fillet. It is not an
accident that the previous error was on a face next to a fillet face.Notice that the Parasolid parts came up almost immediately, but the Pro/ENGINEER parts take
several seconds to process the data. As the imported files become larger and larger and branch into
assemblies, this difference becomes more and more pronounced.Next is a sheet metal part. Open sheet metal.x_t. Change the display to Shaded With Edges.
The part looks good, and Import Diagnosis says that it is okay. Because this is a sheet metal part,
and it appears to have a consistent thickness, you will try to flatten it. Click the Sheet Metal
CommandManager tab, and click the Insert Bends icon (on the far right side). Select the big flat
face as the face to remain stationary (the top selection box), and click the green check mark button
to accept the result.
The sheet metal features are added to the part, but notice in Figure 30.9 that they have failed. A
close inspection of the part reveals that there is a small ledge between the big flat face and the
inside bend on both ends. This was probably a modeling error rather than a translation error. You
might be able to fix this to make it usable as a sheet metal part, but for imported geometry editing,
you’ll need to go to the end of this chapter. Here I cover the results of attempting to repair this
model.FIGURE 30.9
Very small errors can cause special functionality in SolidWorks not to work, and repairing it is not always
straightforward.The last part I want to show in this “watch over the shoulder” demonstration is a part that I con-
sider to be a complete loss. This is an IGES file that came from an Autodesk Mechanical product.
In the CD-ROM, open the file called valve body.igs. This part takes several seconds to import.
When it does import, it has 11 surface bodies, 2 of those with errors, and some obvious problems
with a couple of faces that somehow became out of control. This is one of the reasons so many
users do not recommend using IGES files. This type of error is more prevalent with IGES files than