SolidWorks Drawing Tip: Convert View to Sketch

I’ve been asked a couple of times if there was an easy way to tweak, change, or ‘fudge’ a drawing view. Some people want to change a line style, some may want to change a thickness, and some may just want to hide a line or two to clean up a drawing view. Well, to change a style, a thickness, or hide an edge in a drawing, it’s as simple as selecting the line with the left mouse button. Here you can change any line in your drawing view to be thicker, a different style, or even a different color. You do this from the tool bar that appears when you select on an entity.

For most, this is all that is needed. For a select few, however, it still may not be enough. For those, I remind you of a command that can give you much more flexibility when you need to ‘fudge’ that drawing view – although you must be careful, as it does come with one major drawback.The command you are looking for is called Convert View to Sketch, and you can find this command from the shortcut menu when you right click on any view.

This command allows you to convert any drawing view to sketch entities, or even a sketch block. You will then have a little more flexibility in doing whatever you need to do to that view.For those of you who are having trouble showing exactly what you want, or maybe having a hard time getting a dimension to work out just the right way, this might be the simple trick you need.

Now, the one major drawback:THERE WILL BE NO LINK BETWEEN THE NEW SKETCH ENTITIES AND THE ORIGINAL MODEL OR VIEW. Once you convert the view to a sketch, the parametric link is gone. If you have any further updates down the road, you may have to recreate the view. But it might be a small price to pay to get our views exactly the way we want.

Once again, SolidWorks has given us one of many flexible tools that allow us to create our designs/drawings a little faster and a little better.