Hello all,

I have recently been attempting to model a stent in SolidWorks using the following method (pictures are at the bottom of this post):

1) Create a flat sheet of material, taking into account the pattern of the stent's mesh.

2) Use the Flex tool to "roll up" the flat sheet into a cylinder, completing the stent model.

The dimensions of the flat sheet are 5mm x 1.4mm x 0.1mm. The problem is that when I try using the Flex tool to complete the stent model, SolidWorks simply crashes. However, if--before using the Flex tool--I first use the Scale feature to scale/increase the model's dimensions x100, the Flex tool works just fine, and SW doesn't crash. Is there any reason this happens, and is there any way to fix this so that I can get the smaller-scale version to work? I was using SW Student Edition 2010-2011.

Thank you.

Here are screenshots of what I was doing:

Flat sheet:

Attempting to use Flex feature: