Ok, here is the scenario:
My company receives assembly files from our customer drawn as a part (or saved as one). We are a sheetmetal company and the "parts" created are not sheetmetal parts, they are drawn as regular extrusions of the correct thicknesses. So, what we have had to do so far is: 1. open the file and do a save bodies. 2. open each individual part created, create a sheetmetal part from each body, save and export the flat as a DXF. 3. Create drawings.
This can be very time consuming for assemblies that have approximately 100 parts or so in them.
So my questions are these:
1. does anyone know of a good API that I could run that would go through an assembly transform the parts into sheetmetal parts and resave them? I know enough of the programming (or at least how to copy/paste from other API's ive found) to be able to run through and export the DXF's in an assembly. But I have not been able to find anything on how to transform a single part into a sheetmetal part, let alone an assembly, and allow me to either use a gage table or insert the bend deduction/k factor myself.
2. When we do a save bodies some of the parts saved are still too big to be made out of a single sheetmetal part, or too complex. But the saved files are stock parts. Is there a way to use featureworks on a stock part so I can do another save bodies? or is it easier to split the parts?
SolidworksImport export