CadShift Blog

If your flat pattern dimensions are wrong, the K-factor is usually why. But “set the K-factor” is the third step in a process that starts with understanding what K-factor is, what bend deduction is (they are different things expressed in different units), and — critically — knowing which of three separate places in SOLIDWORKS is actually controlling your flat pattern. K-Factor and Bend Deduction Are Not the Same Thing Both K-factor and bend deduction describe what happens to material during bending, but they describe it differently. ...

In Document Properties > Units, the Mass/Section Properties row has a Decimal Places dropdown. Pick any preset — 1, 2, 3 — and the drawing obeys immediately. Pick Custom and nothing visible happens. No input field. No dialog. No spinner. Just the dropdown label sitting there showing “Custom” with nowhere to type the actual number. This is a genuine SOLIDWORKS UI quirk that affects several versions. It is not a bug in your drawing or your template. ...

You have a sketch. You activate Insert > Weldments > Structural Member. You select the sketch lines. SOLIDWORKS either throws an error, silently omits some lines from the resulting bodies, or lets you finish — and the solid bodies pass through each other at every joint without trimming. None of these outcomes produces a clear error message that names the actual cause. This post covers every root cause and the diagnostic sequence to isolate which one is killing your structural members. ...

DWG and DXF come from the same software house and both describe 2D geometry, but they are not interchangeable. DWG is AutoCAD’s native binary storage format. DXF is a text-based exchange format designed so that non-Autodesk software can read AutoCAD data. That distinction has practical consequences for every engineer who exports flat patterns, sends files to fabricators, or receives drawings from a customer. What DWG Actually Is DWG was created by Mike Riddle in 1982, predating AutoCAD itself. Autodesk acquired the format when they acquired the early Interact CAD program. It is a binary file format — you cannot open it in a text editor and make sense of it. The internal structure has changed with every major AutoCAD release: ...

When you have two versions of the same part — the designed file and the manufactured sample, a supplier’s model and your original, or two revisions where you can’t find the delta — SOLIDWORKS has a built-in tool for exactly this. It overlays the geometry, highlights the differences, and produces a report. Most engineers have never seen it because it lives behind an add-in that is disabled by default. It is called Compare Geometry, and it is part of the SOLIDWORKS Utilities add-in. ...

SOLIDWORKS 2026 SP3.2 introduced a regression specific to the flat-pattern DXF export path: bend lines appear in the cleanup window preview, the Bend lines checkbox in the DXF/DWG Output PropertyManager is checked, yet the written DXF has no bend line entities whatsoever. The geometry exports fine. Layers are correct. But the press brake operators get a DXF with no fold marks. This is a distinct failure mode from the SP3 regression documented in the general bend lines troubleshooting guide. That post covers the mapping file regression (enable-flag rows silently cleared) and per-user registry mismatches. The SP3.2 bug is different: the mapping file is intact, the registry value is correct, the entity bitmask is correct — and the export still omits bend lines. ...

A thread on r/SolidWorks recently got 44 upvotes and 40 comments: an engineer described how SolidWorks PDF exports include content outside the drawing sheet boundary that is invisible in Adobe Acrobat but becomes visible when the file is opened in Inkscape. One commenter said they spot-checked 50 drawings from their archive — 26 had off-page objects. This is not a bug or a recent regression. It is how PDF works, and how SolidWorks has always exported drawings. The PDF format stores a complete stream of drawing objects. Standard PDF viewers clip rendering to the declared page boundary (the MediaBox), so content outside the sheet never appears on screen or in print. But the data is physically present in the file. Tools that parse the raw content stream — Inkscape, Illustrator, PDF preflight tools — display everything they find, including geometry outside the sheet. ...

A common source of confusion for engineers new to SOLIDWORKS Electrical: you open Windows Explorer, navigate to your usual SOLIDWORKS projects folder, and find only 3D cable route assemblies and harness parts — but no schematic files. The actual electrical schematics appear to be missing. They are not missing. They live in a completely different location, in a completely different format, managed by a completely different database engine. Understanding this separation is the first step to finding your files, setting up backups, and knowing what you can and cannot share. ...

Generating SolidWorks drawings manually — open part, new drawing, place views, fill title block, insert BOM, save PDF — is fine for a handful of parts. At scale it becomes a bottleneck. The SolidWorks API exposes every step of that workflow, and a well-structured macro or add-in can generate complete drawing packages for an entire assembly in minutes. This post covers the full pipeline: creating drawing documents from a template, adding model views, populating title block annotations from custom properties, inserting BOMs, and exporting to PDF. Both VBA (for quick scripts) and C# (for production add-ins) approaches are shown. ...

A DXF file represents geometry in 2D — lines, arcs, splines, and circles with no thickness, no material, and no bend information. SOLIDWORKS’s sheet metal system represents a 3D part with folded geometry derived from a flat pattern governed by a K-factor and material thickness. The import workflow is about bridging those two representations, and there are three different paths depending on what you start with. What You’re Actually Working With Before choosing an approach, establish what the DXF contains: ...