Fri 11/12/1999 Tip #2

(SolidWorks 99 and earlier)

Open the drawing that contains the curve entities you want to insert.

Open the part where you want to insert the entities. (New part or existing part)

Open a sketch and click Insert à Sketch from Drawing.

From the Window menu, select the drawing to make it the active window.

Box-select the entities with the left mouse button.

Return to the part window. The entities have been inserted into the active sketch in the part, and you can now edit the sketch, and use it to make features.

The drawing uses the same X, Y, and Z points as the original AutoCAD drawing or translated program for both the drawing part of SolidWorks and the part area of SolidWorks.

After the sketch is in the part document, click on the pull down, Tools à Relations à Constrain all this will add relations of horizontal, vertical, tangent, and any obvious relations that are needed.  This saves you time doing it yourself.!

To move the sketch to the correct space on the model, you can dimension it and move it, or use the *modify sketch tool (Tools à Sketch Tools à Modify) to place a point to a known X, Y value in the model.

*Modify Sketch: Allows you to move, rotate, or scale a sketch.