Expanded Steel

Hello, I have a part I have created that needs to be covered in expanded steel on many of the faces. Does anyone know if there is an addon or even a bare feature of solid works to help me through this? I am not looking forword to drawing it all out. =(

Also Solidworks 2003

Thank you, Jonathan Putter

Welcome to the CADTutor forum.

CT Forum member and frequent contributor J.D. Mather has offered some good advice on handling this situation in the AUGI Discussion Forums. Take a look at this exchange:

http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=58749

While that was a fantastic idea, Solidworks or atleast my version does not seem to have a the ability to import files for custom colors, so I am stuck with solid colors. I think it looks like I am going to have to draw it out.

Thank you again,

Jonathan Putter

i only started using SW when 08 was released but there is an expanded steel material in 08 and 09. Sorry im not sure about 03.

I was wrong. I have plenty of treadplate materials and chain link fence but no expanded steel.

You can view one of the various sites that offer materials and apply it to your part so it looks like expanded steel, or you can draw one section and create an array.

here is one.

http://www.cgtextures.com/texview.php?id=3384&PHPSESSID=4a1b55e8cef963c12b647a15e1433556

here is the material on the right applied to a C shaped channel in SW09(rendered). If you apply it to a surface and not a solid, play with the transparencies you will get something you can see through but it will certainly take some work. The downside to actually modeling this is the number of features will really bog most machines down.