Michael Lord

When we built close on 12 years ago I did all the outside, retaining walls, landscaped, driveway, the rear deck & pergola. 

The deck was design to suit around a swimming pool, but after many attempts to obtain quotes which didn’t come with “this is only an estimate & we wont know until we commence”  it all became a bit too hard (& money became a bit to tight).  So after many years, many different flowerbed & barbecue arrangements we final decided that we should now square it up. (OK – This was always an option, it just hasn’t happened)

This proved not to be a bad thing as it gave me an excuse to have a look in SolidWorks at Weldments.  There is always plenty of discussion about the advantage of using Weldments but it is one of those tools that is seen as specific to a certain style of manufacture. In it’s case the “cut & weld” manufacturing.   It’s also one of the tools that for “many” it is not introduced early in their use of SolidWorks.   I fall into that category & although I’ve had the odd play with it I don’t use it all that much in my work life. 

One of Weldments main tricks is that it generates Cut-List & for this job that’s a great advantage.  I like to pre-cut all my components before I start & having a Cut-List makes that much simpler (without the need to dimension a lot of drawings)     So to start I modeled up the existing desk & then the extension.

Ok I did some rendering as well

The model (Deck) is just a Multi-bodied Part. (Boss-extrudes, Cut-extrudes & Linear Patterns not merged) but when the Weldment feature is selected it produces a Cut-List  

What it does nice is that when it produces the Cut-List it includes the feature (seed) used for LPattern in the number count (& the same folder).

So from there it is a case of inserting the Cut-List Table into a drawing.

From there I can Save As the Table to a Excel format (& then add a few columns for additional items – Order Quantities & Cost)

 
A productive & educational Sunday afternoon.   Which means shopping for timber next week, followed by clearing grass & digging some holes!