hey all

I'm fairly new to Solidworks; I design speaker systems and normally use other programs but a relaitive, and engineer, recomended it and is letting me try out his work copy to see if it works for me and I would like to invest myself.

So far so good, and although one or two parts have been a steep learning curve I'm getting there and its a huge improvement over what I was using before. Have came up on a problem though, really a work flow problem, and need some advice. I've read through a few different help threads on sililar subjects but cant really get a solid answer so i'm sure all of you guys far more experienced than me can help.

All of the work i'm doing is using panels cut from plywood, usually 15 or 18mm. Unfortunatly rather than the boxes just being square they often contain various complicated horn paths and braces which means lots of parts with unusual mitre/chamfer angles.

For the first model I created, after making the base piece and inserting it into an assembly I was able to sketch onto that various other panels as new parts and create them within the assembly. I got the finished assembly together and it looked great, and then inserted the pieces into sheets only to find that becaise they weren't orientated to axis that the views were off. However for these, because they were mostly known angles after a bit of searching online I found the move/copy command and was able to rotate them back into line. While it wasnt a perfect solution (as far as I can see the original sketch geometry still stays off axis at the original location) it worked fine.

However I've now tried to insert a much more complicated part and this meathod doesnt work, and its the kind of piece i will have to work with quite a lot so I should really get to the bottom of it and create a proper work flow to solve this. So.....

I have a corner made up of three flat sections. Horizontally the angle between the panels is 40 degrees and the angle to the lid piece from these is 90 degrees........

and i would like to close off the corner with an angled piece to reduce the corner volume like this......

The other panels dont need cut away or anything to join with it, this piece just needs inserted into place to close of the corner.   Now i have drawn and created the piece as you can see within the assembly, and have saved it as a part and inserted it into a drawing but have the same problem as before that because it doesn't lie on any plane (I had to draw across all three planes to get it into place) when i insert it into a drawing it is off angle, and i can't just use the move copy command because i've drawn it fairly arbiterily into the corner and don't have exact angles or sizes i can type in to move it.

I assume there must be a more sensible way of doing this than what I am currently doing that would solve this problem, and wonder if people can point me towards it. As i see it my choices are to either A) have some way to set a new set of axis specifically for that part within the assembly, even though its out of line with the axis of the over all assembly, so that when i start to draw it it's already on axis or B) have a better way of somehow moving the axis or rotating the part after its been drawn and saved out of the assembly into its own part file.

thanks in advance for all your help guys,

Kev