Challenge
The shop designed frames in a desktop CAD seat on one machine, then translated geometry to the floor by hand: printed drawings, whiteboard trigonometry for cope angles, and paper wrap templates for every fishmouth joint.
Errors surfaced at the notcher, where a wrong cope angle costs a tube and an hour. Seasonal helpers could not touch the CAD seat at all.
Solution
The shop rebuilt its frame workflow around solidSF's sketch-driven tube modeling: frame centerlines as 3D sketches, members assigned from a stock library, and one trim rule deciding which member at each joint stays straight and which gets coped.
Cut lists with per-spec totals and cope geometry now export directly from the model. Helpers open the same document read-only on whatever laptop is nearest the saw.
“The cut list and the notch angles come out of the same model the customer approved. We stopped discovering geometry problems at the notcher.”
Owner and lead fabricator
Results
Frame design-to-first-tube dropped from about two weeks to four days, with scrap tube from bad copes effectively eliminated.
Customer change requests - wider cage, different shock mounts - propagate through the centerline sketch, and the cut list updates itself. The shop quotes faster because the material total is a model output, not an estimate.