UPDATED: SAMPLE PICTURES ADDED (pictures of a 2.7mm thick part to be made of transparent material)

Hello

I'm currently working on a vehicle design with the approach of making surfaces and then convert them to solid.

I had several issues with SolidWorks to give the desired thickness to my parts (which could be another topic for discussion, though it is related to this issue).

The desired thickness is 4.1mm, and none of my parts could achieve that thickness via shell, thicken, or a single surface offset (e.g. 4.1mm offset) of the original surfaces. Therefore, I came along with a creative and messy method of making several offsets of the original surfaces (e.g. 1.5mm + 1mm + 0.75mm + 0.5mm + 0.35mm) - sometimes by selectively offsetting surfaces and avoiding fillets to be successful, which made my project even messier! - Or by offsetting half of the part several times and mirroring the end result. Although my project became very heavy and hard for the computer to load, it was successful (partially, as I will explain below).

But I noticed a big issue. Each time I run SolidWorks and open my part, besides waiting a few minutes for the computer to open the part, I face some rebuilt errors. Particularly, with the value of my surface offsets. Each time I fix the issue and the problem would be resolved, but as soon I close the part and open it again, the same problems occur!

First I'm wondering, rationally, how is it possible that the software can once define an offset with a given value and without any issues, then the next time the very same offset cannot be built and the software would give me an error (once a given value for offset works, the next time - without making any changes to the model whatsoever, the exact value would not work!)

Next, I'm wondering if you know any solutions to this matter? is there anything that I can do to make sure the offsets would be built problem-free all the time? Any other suggestions regarding the matter?

Finally, while it's not directly related to the topic of this question, I'm wondering how I can properly and in a clean fashion achieve a certain thickness when the shell, thicken, or offset (single command to achieve the end result) does not work?

Thanks a lot

Message was edited by: Omid Vahidi Samples added