All your tubing sizes (weldments)

[standfast]

Once you have Solidworks installed you can go in and add weldments for the tubing sizes and wall thicknesses you intend to use. Weldments are basically structural tube profiles that would be applied your 2D and 3D line sketches and quickly turn them into a tubular structure.

To add new weldment sizes to your library you can download them here.

Round tubing - A1 Round Tubing: Parts & Assemblies

Square Tubing - A1 Tube (square: Parts & Assemblies)

Once you have the sizes you need downloaded you can add a folder in this location(C:\Program Files\SolidWorks\data\weldment profiles\ansi inch) titled "tubing" and stick them in that folder.

To apply the new weldments to your line sketches, complete your line sketch, then click the "insert" tab then scroll to "weldments", then click on structural member. On the right side of the screen, open the new tubing folder you added and select the tubing size you want and click on the lines you want to turn into those tubes. BAM! instant tube structures!

One thing to note when you are adding weldments is that you will only be able add weldments on the same axis or related axis at a time. If it will not add another weldment after you click on your first "line" then the second one is not within that axis. Just complete that first weldment and do the second one in another weldment. No big deal.

If you need to learn how to sketch lines in 3D there is a 3D sketching tutorial under the "help" tab. This tutorial uses sweeps to creat the tubing which takes much longer but the tutorial will help you learn the basics of line sketching in 3D. Hopefully this will help save some of you guys some time that I have wasted figuring this stuff out.