Howdy,

I'm building multibody sheet metal weldments in a single *.sldprt file. (if a part is all welded I've traditionally drawn it as a single *.sldprt)

Probably the most annoying thing that has plagued me over the past years has been the instability in my method of cutting intersecting sheet metal bodies.

*see attached image

As shown, what I have taken to doing is making a sketch on one of the intersecting faces... super simple... click the sheet metal face.. so on.

once in the sketch I used to do use pierce point mate the line to the edge of the adjacent face. but it was unstable. So I searched for another method.

I found the sketch command "intersection curve". I have **better** luck with it than pierce point.

I usually leave this line as it's own stand alone sketch (so it's easy to fix, I know instantly what happened when that sketch and the two following cuts fail), then start a new sketch on each of the bodies to cut off the excess using "convert entities" on that line.

but... still not stable. I opened this model this morning after it being stable all last week and boom.... error'ed out.  so frustrating.

What it should look like:

I don't think it has anything to do with the sketch itself. Usually I loose one of the sheet metal face sketch planes... it has to be something like solidworks renaming the sheetmetal bodies internally and loosing its references.

Please tell me there is a better way to do this that I'm oblivious to!

Thanks,

-Roark