The ability to use sketches to rip sheet metal parts may be one of the most important features, especially when importing solids. The rip feature used to only be able to rip linear edges on the part. However, as you can see in the example to the left, this would not work since the bottom is missing gaps to rip by. Instead of going through the effort of using a complex cut feature to add the gaps you can simply use sketches.
This technique will only work if the sketches terminate at verticies on the part. Notice in the example how each of the sketch entities start and end at verticies on the part. The sketches do not need to be separate for each entity either. In this case the four entities are all within one 2D sketch on that bottom face.
Now you are ready to insert your bends! First, you select the fixed face and then scroll down to reveal the Rip Parameters. and select on the edges and sketches that rips can be added to. It is good practice to make sure the rip edges are sharing verticies so in the example to the right notice how the sketch entity and the model edge are setup. Selecting the inside edge may cause issues when trying to perform a rip like this. Now you can flatten your part properly without having to perform a ton of preprocessing procedures. ~Lou

I have talked about this tool before in the podcast but I thought I would take the opportunity to show the interface of this little data utility in order to bring a level of clairity to the table. This tool is located in the installation directory under Toolbox/data utilities. Once inside of the data utilities folder you can launch the sldsetdocprop.exe by double clicking on it. This will popup the Set Document Property dialog box.

This tool was made to alter the toolbox flag that is recognized by both SolidWorks and PDMWorks Workgroup. Many times users want to take files from the toolbox and modify them and check them into the PDMWorks vault. If your vault settings are set to exclude the check in of these documents, even if you moved your modified Toolbox part to another location, PDMWorks will not allow check in of this document because of this internal flag.

In order to remove this flag, selection of the Property state from “Yes” to “No” will now allow this file to be seen as any old SolidWorks file. On the flip side, you can take your standard SolidWorks files and change them so they are considered to be a Toolbox part when in an assembly or inside of PDMWorks. The tool also allows a nice bulk update interface by adding files and/or directories as well as a filter for file types. Once you have added all the files to modify in the update window, click on the “Update Status” button and the flag has been changed! ~Lou