From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2013-2017: Sheet Metal Design

Looking at sheet metal tools - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2013-2017: Sheet Metal Design

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Looking at sheet metal tools

By default, the Sheet Metal tools are not shown in SolidWorks. So we need to activate the Sheet Metal ribbon. Also besides using the tools in the ribbon, we can also access the Sheet Metal toolbar from the file system. To get started, let's go ahead and start up with a new file. Click on New, click on Part, click on OK. And notice the ribbon bar. We've got Features, Sketch, and a few others. But we don't see Sheet Metal. So right-click on any one of these tabs and you'll see all the available toolbars that we can turn on, all the available ribbon bars. And we need Sheet Metal, so click on that. And notice that just gets added to the list of tabs. See there? We can also access it from the file system, so if you see this small little arrow here at the top. If I mouse over it, it does a little fly out. And if I want to keep that out, I can go ahead and push on that push pin at the very end. Then under Insert. Come down to Sheet Metal and I've got the available tools here. I can also right click anywhere in this gray area of the screen next to the (UNKNOWN) system's logo. And I can see all of the available tool bars that I can turn on and one of them happens to be Sheet Metal. Click on that and the Sheet Metal ribbon or bar shows up. And I can drag it around the screen and I can dock it in different places on the screen wherever I want. If you don't want it go ahead and click on the red x and it goes away. Solidworks has a full set of tools for working with Sheet Metal as well as some handy tools for converting parts to Sheet Metal. The key thing to remember is for the best parts, start them as native Sheet Metal designs. So load the Sheet Metal toolbar and let's get started.

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