Solidworks - Convert 3D part face to 2D DXF DWG Drawing for Plasma Torch Cutting Laser Waterjet

In this video I explain a very easy and efficient way of saving a solid part that is flat to a DWG file that can be e-mailed to your manufacturer. It can be used for numerous types of cutting. I use it mainly for having parts water jetted, a very economical form of cutting to keep from warping thick metals and holding tight tolerances.

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Closed Caption:

hey guys Raymond K back here with
another solidworks tutorial in this
tutorial I'm going to show you very
quickly how to save a flat part to a DWG
or dxf file that you can send off to
have water jet adore plasma burn or
however you want to have it cut out
first let's create a new part select the
sketch and then we'll just make some
funky looking part i think this is going
to go on a motorcycle
one of these days let's extrude it to a
quarter-inch say we're cutting it out of
quarter-inch steel maybe not a
motorcycle looks kind of like a key we
can make a key out of that now that
we've got our part
let's go ahead and view orient to normal
too
now from the experience I've had normal
to is the best way to save your DWG it
helps you do it very quickly and very
easily now let's go to file save as i'm
just going to save this save as DWG
now it gives you the option here to save
it as current which we have is normal to
or you can say with his top front left
right back whatever but normal to to me
is just buy for the easiest because
everything is already set up for you at
this point you can either hit enter and
it will automatically save it to the
specified path or you can hit your green
checkmark up here and it will bring up
the option to where it shows you what it
looks like before you save it now if you
have a circle in here or something that
you don't want to be cut out
you can go ahead and select it and
remove entities it will take it out your
DWG before it's saved which is a very
nice feature so we'll go ahead and save
it now will open up that tutorial in a
2d program i use draftsight that's
dassault systèmes autocad basically
it's very good cheap little of basic to
deprogram you can actually do quite a
bit with it now that you're in this
program you can take some measurements
if you want to and you'll see that it is
saved your part in a one-to-one ratio
now there's other ways of saving your DW
geez that they want exactly come out to
12 1 i've had this problem trying to
email stuff off to have cut out and
saving it the way that I just did is by
far the easiest best way to save a 2-d
2-d file to have sent off to be cut
you can also do the same thing with the
sheet metal parts to have them they're
flat patterns cut it will automatically
fold it out for you and save it as a
one-to-one ratio to have cut out i'll
hopefully get a video posted that
sometime before long just to show you
how it works but for this video
that's it i hope you learned something
and thank you for watching