Hello Folks,
I am very new to solidworks. I used it a few years ago and became decent at it and then we moved locations and switched our company completely around. Now i am back in the drivers seat with the latest version and have a few tasks ahead of me that i want to make sure i start correctly. We build heavy mining equipment as well as castings and machining.

I have to design one of our mainframes. Its composed of appx 100 parts. All of which are basic metal plates all of which get welded together to form the frame. I have all these prints in autocad right now and i am looking for the best way to accomplish getting a complete "assembly" 3d model of our frame. Where do i start?

Do i complete each piece as its own drawing and then put them part by part in an assembly? Do i design it all on here? Should i use the cad drawings and then bring them into solidworks to put a depth to them? Do i need to begin in sheet metal?

Just need a basic idea on the best way to get started, either from scratch or from the prints i already have. How all of you start from the beginning a big project like this, and any tips or advice is much appeciated. The frames we build are basically a underground dump truck.

Thanks so much for any help.

Brian