I am new to solidworks so apologies if this is an easy fix.

I am trying to take a thin walled cylindrical part and deform it so that there is an indented helix profile running almost the full length.

I can manage to produce a solid part using extrude and cut features as normal but the part I am deforming has a pattern cut out the entire surface so I really need to produce it with a deform tool so that it matches the actual manufacturing process.

Any help would be appreciated. If you think you could help I can supply a picture of a similar part that wasn't produced by myself to show you the idea. It has some errors in it but as it was produced on another machine and I only have a stp file I cant see how they achieved what they did and where they went wrong.