When designing a Weldment in SolidWorks, you’re creating a multi-body part file (not an assembly). When detailing a weldment it’s also a requirement to detail all the bodies in the model so that each part can be manufactured. Often the parts that are being manufactured are not made by the same person, or even the same company so you’ll often need seperate drawing files with separate detailing requirements.

So in SOLIDWORKS; you’ve made your Weldment and it’s looking good. You’ve also made a 2D drawing of the model detailing the dimensions. But now what you need is a separate drawing sheet for each body.

How to do this???

What you need to do is use the “Save Bodies” command. The Save Bodies command can be found in 2 places;

1)  Insert>Features>Save Bodies

2) Right Click the Cutlist folder in the Feature Manager Tree and select Save Bodies

Either way is the same result.

Once you click Save Bodies you’re presented with the Save Bodies Property Manager. Here you can individually name your bodies (these names will become their file names). There is an Auto Assign button, this will take the names from the  Bodies themselves out of the cutlist folder, these names could be pretty random and mean very little to you, so it might be work naming them manually.

Save Bodies Property Manager:

In the property manager you can also select to “Consume Bodies” which means: Removes the body from the part. Consumed bodies are not listed in the Feature Manager design tree under Solid Bodies.

You can also select to “Create Assembly”, here you click Browse to select a name for the new assembly and a location. Creating an assembly takes all the saved bodies and places them into an assembly file  (using in place mates). This process gives you the benefits of assemblies and assembly BOM etc.

You can specify a part template to use and then click OK (Green tick) and you’re done.

SolidWorks will now save all the bodies to the same location as the Weldment, if you want to chage the location you can double click any body in the property manager and specify a different location.

Once you click OK, you’ll now have separate files for each body that you can now insert into drawing files and detail individually.

Note: the newly created parts and/or assembly file will remain linked to the weldment file they were generated from, so if you make changes to the main part file (Weldment) then these changes will propergate through to the referenced parts files, so don’t make changes to the newly created parts, make your changes to the original Weldment file. The reference parts will update when they are opened.

Hope this helps.