Hi,

I have a solid part that I have designed to be manufactured by vacuum forming. I need to turn it into a surface and create STEP and x_b files to make it and while it seems easy to make a solid from a surface, I am having trouble figuring out how to do the reverse.

I tried making an offset surface by selecting every face on the front of the part and setting the offset distance to 0 inches. I then hid the boss-extrude feature (obviously suppressing it caused the surface to disappear too). This produced the desired result but I was concerned that it wouldn't work when opened in BobCAD (which will be used to vacuum form it) and sure enough, I was told the solid part still showed up.

How can I create a surface that is identical to the surface of a solid body (which is technically over 100 smaller surfaces so hopefully I won't have to create that many new individual surfaces)? And how do I get it alone in a file? I tried to edit -> copy the surface but Solidworks said it couldn't be copied. This has been my only experience doing anything with surfaces and I'm totally stumped. Thank you so much for helping!