Flattening Sheet Metal Solidworks With Cuts

The bend lines are shown by default when you unsuppress flat pattern1.

Flattening sheet metal solidworks with cuts.

In either the featuremanager design tree or the cut list right click the flat pattern feature for the part and click unsuppress. You can select several faces to define a normal sheet metal side wall not top or bottom faces. To flatten the entire part if the flat pattern1 feature is present unsuppress flat pattern1 or click flatten on the sheet metal toolbar. Patrick you can t flatten surface in anything but the the latest versions of solidworks even then there is no feature to re form them.

In the cut list right click the body and click flatten. These improvements also provide better flattened geometry for certain corner treatments lofted bends and in some cases where cuts intersect bend regions. Your best bet would be to make this using the sheet metal functions unfold it add your holes fold it then if you need a surface to do a surface offset of 0. The normal cut tool applies a normal cut feature that is independent from the tools that removed the material.

With the normal cut tool you can normalize all non normal side walls in sheet metal models. In addition a cut list contains a separate representation for each body with a flat pattern specific to the body. To hide the bend lines expand flat pattern1 right click bend lines and select hide. All features after flat pattern1 appear only in the flattened sheet metal part.

Improvements to flattening sheet metal parts make flattening succeed for complex shapes which previously failed.