SOLIDWORKS: Weldment Profiles

When using SOLIDWORKS for designing Weldments you can have your profile stored two different ways. The default/most common way is to have individual weldment profiles for each size of each type of each standard.

The second way is to have a configured sketch saved as a Weldment profile.

Let’s take a look at how these are set up.

First, let’s look at where our Weldment profiles are saved:
We can find this in Tools -> Options -> System Options -> File Locations -> Weldment Profiles:

Here we can see that the default location is <install folder>langenglishweldment profiles. <install folder> is C:Program FilesSOLIDWORKS CorpSOLIDWORKS by default.

The folder structure typically looks like this:

Let’s look at how this compares to using the Structural member command in SOLIDWORKS:

Here you can see that the folders underneath the ‘weldment profiles’ folder (highlighted in Red) show up as the standards available in the Structural Member PropertyManager.

You can also see that the folders within the standards show up as the dropdown for ‘Type’. These are highlighted in Green. Also in green are a couple of weldment profile sketches. These are the configured ones and also show up under ‘Type’ with the suffix ‘- Configured’ indicating that they’re a weldment profile with configurations.

As far as usage goes, they behave in the same way. Select the Standard, then the type, then the size:
Below examples of the PropertyManager used with both types.

Ultimately what this comes down to is file management and preference. Both work the same. One requires more files on your system using more file size, but the other is easier to look through and see what you have. My personal preference is configured files due to both the disc space savings (configured file above is 55kb, the 3 files in the non-configured folder are 47, 48, and 49KB), and the ease in which you can create configurations with a design table.

Fred Zobel
SR. Support Engineer
Computer Aided Technology, LLC