SOLIDWORKS: Bend Note Formatting

Bend Note Formatting

Bend notes, in your sheet metal part drawings, are a clear way to provide the required information for manufacturing. They can be automatically inserted into the flat pattern drawing view. These bend notes will describe the bend direction, bend angle, and bend radius for each bend, within SOLIDWORKS.

In many cases, the manufacturer will have to determine the exact bend radius based on their tooling options. If this is your scenario, you may desire to have this bend radius information omitted from the bend note. The brute force method is to edit each note individually and remove this portion of the text. Another option is to edit the specific text file that controls the default formatting of the bend note. This is easily performed by following these steps below:

The “File Locations” settings in the system options will indicate where this text file is located.

In this folder, you will find the “bendnoteformat.txt” text file. Editing this text file shows the current formatting of the callouts for these bend properties.

Removing or reordering portions of this format will affect the notes displayed in flat pattern views that are created in the future.

After implementing this edit, you can see how the new bend notes are formatted. They no longer contain the bend radius information.

Editing this format text file in SOLIDWORKS will not modify any of your existing drawings. These changes will only control the bend notes inserted in new files.

Greg Buter
Sr. Application Engineer
Computer Aided Technology