Hey all,

So, I'm a bit newer to using SolidWorks for creating Assembly drawings, in the past, I've only ever had to create drawings for individual parts, where the amount of hidden lines that I needed to hide manually was easily manageable.

However, I am now working on an assembly drawing, and I have a bit of an issue. Some areas on the model, where I need to have hidden lines visible, there is an impossible number of lines that would need hidden at once... For instance, in this machine, the area where a piece of work is being held down is being shown, but the work is a surface model with 16,000 edges. In any particular view there is thousands of lines that have to be removed. I have searched all over trying to find the proper way to handle this sort of issue. My understanding is that I cannot use box selection to select hidden lines, which I have tried to find an option that would allow this, but no luck.

Another issue I am having is, on detail/section views, for some reason I am unable to hide certain lines. I just keep clicking the manual Hide/Show edges button, the line flashes, and never goes away. I have found help topics of people discussing this... in 2006, 2008, etc., but nothing as of late.

I guess my general question is - what are the proper ways to deal with complex parts with lots and lots of hidden lines, that need to be removed? In other 2D programs, I could just sketch a box and delete the lines behind it, if I wanted, but I cannot find a simple solution like that here.

I've attached a couple of pictures which may help explain my question.

Sorry for asking what is probably a very simple question. Try as I might - I can't find what feels like an appropriate solution.

Edit to add: I am running SW 2015 SP4.0

Thanks!