Weldments...and more

Weldments have been around for quite a long time in SolidWorks; introduced in the release of SolidWorks 2004, Weldments make it much easier to create structural steel assemblies. In this posting, I’ve taken the opportunity to answer a few questions about the tool and to highlight some things that might help even the most experienced of users to get the full use of this extremely powerful tool.

Q: What is a “Weldment”?

A: That’s a great question. Every time I type “Weldment”, spellchecker goes crazy and says it doesn’t exist as a word. A “Weldment” is typically structural steel or aluminum members that form some kind of framework.











Q: Okay, great…I don’t do structural steel shapes, I’ll just deactivate “Weldments” from my Command Manager

A: Hold on just a second….the “Weldment functionality” in SolidWorks can be used to quickly create any model where a typical profile follows a path. Think of something like a deck. Decks are typically constructed using a few different size board profiles (2 x 4, 2 x 6,etc). We can use SolidWorks to sketch the path for all the boards and then lay in the profiles using the “Structural Member tool”. The great thing is that Weldments can be used to produce a cut list (similar to Bill of Materials for assemblies), and in this example you could take it down to your favorite hardware supply store to purchase your materials.














Q: When I activate the Structural Member command, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of options for profiles to follow my path.

A: That is correct. You may have to create profiles for “non-steel” shapes such as 2 x 4’s, etc., but if you do it once, that option will always be available for you down the road. It’s a pretty easy process to create those profiles. Typically, if you used the default install location, your weldment profiles will be located in some area such as C:\Program Files\SolidWorks Corp\SolidWorks\data\weldment profiles

You can always open up and modify an existing profile (saving it as a different name, etc.); you can see below that it’s a pretty basic sketch that you are working with. The subtle difference is that this is saved as a library part vs. a regular part file.


















Q: All we do is structural steel shapes and we use a lot of them. Why can’t SolidWorks just include them in a library for us?

A: Actually…they did. SolidWorks included the profiles, but there is a little process to add them in. In fact, you must first download the profiles from the internet. My guess is that the reason they are not included on the default install is that the size of all those profiles eats up a good amount of disk space. If you download the “Ansi Inch” group alone, it’s over 30MB.

Go over to your design library area in the Task Pane, and browse the folder at the bottom “SolidWorks Content”. There, you will see a variety of profiles. If you hover above the icon, then instructions will pop up that tell you to hold “Control” and left click to download the zip file. Download the file to a location you like. After the download, you will need to unzip the files and locate them in the Weldment profile directory (described above). If you have done that correctly, you will get all the weldment profiles you could ever want or need when you go back into the Structural Member tool.