Notice the sheet size did change and I can place this part wherever I like on that sheet. Well, sometimes that is a glitch inside of SOLIDWORKS or if it can't find the sheet size you might be looking for, you might have to come back and change that one more time, so keep that in mind. Now notice down here under sheet size it did change. Now here are the Sheet Properties and I want to make sure this says 1:1, very important, otherwise your part is just going to show up at the right size. And then right-click anywhere in the white area here and come over here to Properties. So if you bring this down here you can see Use sheet scale or you can say Use custom scale. Now, of course, we want to make sure this is the right scale. So go over here, view options, Model View, I want this one right here, so click over there, and now I can just drop that onto my blank sheet. Click OK and now we have a blank sheet, here it is. It says if the file path's not perfect, that's OK. But keep it a multiple of a standard piece of material you might buy. Maybe it's a 12 by 12 sheet and you can put a lot of parts on there. So maybe your sheet is a four foot by eight foot sheet, so you want to type in some kind of values here for the Width and Height that represent a sheet of material or a section of a sheet. But you generally want to think about how you're going to lay these things out on a standard sheet of material. So if your part is three feet long make your sheet a little bit bigger than three feet. And this is important, because you want to make sure that you actually make a sheet that is the size of your part or a little bit bigger than your part. I'm going to type in something like 12 inches. Now come over here and click on Custom size. So click over here and turn off Display sheet format. If it can't find the sheet format that's OK, because I'm going to turn it off anyway. Now we can eliminate the title block on this page if you'd like to, but generally it's a good idea to kind of leave a dimension drawing on page one and then create a new page. We actually want a page that has nothing on it, we want a blank page. We actually get a couple dimensions here, but this page really doesn't matter to us. Now the first view you're going to bring in is maybe like a front view. Click on that one and I'm going to choose the Drawing here, click on OK, and it should fire up a brand new drawing. My favorite generally is come over here and say Make Drawing from Part. Of course, we have other ways we can do that as well. To do that go up here to File, New, or just come over here and click on the part itself, click on it and say Open Drawing if you already have a drawing. So we need to actually make a drawing of this part. Now the next process is a little bit more complicated. We can send that file now to whoever's going to process this part via laser or water jet or whatever type of machine they have. But if everything looks good click on Save and now we've saved that file to our file system, wherever we happened to place that, and we're ready to go. So you can come back and edit that file if you want to. But prior to that if you did have something there that you didn't want you can always come over here to Remove Entities. And that's pretty much exactly what we need, so click on Save. I can output an alignment option if I'd like to or just go ahead and click on OK and it should give you a representation of what it's actually going to save out. Over here it's saying I'd like to export that face. But generally either one will probably work. The file size might be a little bit different between the two, but generally DXF is probably a better choice, 'cause it's more universal. I can also come down here and choose a DWG file. Here is where I want to save it out to and notice it gives me the option for a DXF file. Now my window popped up over here, let me just go ahead and just drag that back over to the screen so you can see it. So right-click on that face, come over here to Export DXF/DWG and you should get a window that pops up. First things first, if you have a part that looks like this, very simple, simple geometry, and if I click on the top surface if that surface there is exactly what you want to be cut you're in luck, 'cause we can save that file out directly from SOLIDWORKS without actually even going to a drawing. And we have to also make sure we're saving out the files correctly, so that those machines can import them in and you can get the right parts back. We want to make sure everything's scaled correctly and that's scaled 1:1. We don't want things coming back the wrong size or half size or double size. Anytime you're working with sheet metal parts or plate or anything you're going to laser cut, water jet, plasma cut, or any other flat cutting process, even die-cutting, more than likely you're probably going to need either a DWG or a DXF file scaled 1:1.

Edrawings print to scale