Show only die shoe burnouts and slug openings

A common need is to be able to send a die set model or a die set drawing to the die set manufacturer that contains only the burnouts and nothing else. (You may wish to also include the lifting holes, any custom milling, etc…) But oftentimes you don’t prepare this drawing or model until the die shoe is full of other holes in addition to the slug openings and/or other burnouts.

One method of doing this is to create a new configuration in your die shoe part file, switch to that configuration and then suppress those things you do not want until all you see is the slug openings. But this could be quite time consuming and carries with it a certain level of risk.

There is a much faster and less risky way to achieve this same goal. First I would encourage you to carefully count how many slug openings you have in your die shoe and then write this number down. Then simply create a new configuration called Slug Openings Only and note that this newly created configuration is now the active configuration. Start a sketch on the face of the die shoe and then use the SolidWorks Convert Entities command to convert all of the entities from the outside of the die shoe and also those edges around the slug openings that you wish to keep. Once you are certain that you have not missed converting any edges from any openings, do a SolidWorks Boss/Base Extrude and make it the same thickness as the die shoe, effectively eliminating all holes (from this active configuration) other than the burnouts you wish to keep.

Tips:

1. Be sure to double check the number of slug openings that you wrote down with the number of openings remaining
2. If you wish to have tapped lifting holes or other things remaining that you wish for the die set manufacturer to put in, you will want to create the sketch in such a way that it goes around these features so that it doesn’t cause them to disappear
3. See the next knowledgebase post called “Convert Entities tips”