I recently had a question from a customer asking if there was a way to convert a regular old named or projected view to a complete section view. Let’s say you fully detail a view up with many dimensions, notes, symbols, etc… and then you want to convert it to a section view to revel more details. My first answer was no, we cannot perform such an action. However, after having my morning coffee the next day, I had a revelation; why not use the “Broken Out Section View” option?
The broken out section view is typically used to review the inner workings of a part or assembly view in a small portion of the view, rather than making a separate section view. When the user creates a broken out section, SolidWorks promptly places you into the spline tool where you can draw a boundary for the sectioned out area. Then you can manually enter a value for the depth or choose an edge in a projected view to determine the depth. But rather than drawing a small spline area for the broken out area, you can draw the spline all the way around the view, or even draw a rectangle before entering the broken out section command and then it will use that for the boundary.
The dimensions in the view that still make sense at the section depth still appear. in other words, dimensions to features which no longer appear in the view are removed automatically. I hope this post get’s you out of a jam!
