I just spent several hours at my dealer, evaluating if the weldment feature would work for us. If I were to adopt SW, I would spend 95% of my time working in this feature. I thought I would give my observations here, and see if any others had comments.
The general process is to create a 3d sketch of lines, which represent some edge or center of the tubing you are going to use. Then once you start the process, you select the lines you want a particular profile to be used with. However, all the lines you select for this operation are locked to the same "pierce point". So, if the line represents the outside edge of the tubing on one part of the sketch, but the inside edge on another, you must do them as separate operations. This is not a big deal, until you go to create a cut-list. Each individual operation must have its description manually edited, the description of the profile doesn't come in automatically.
Actually, I realize there may be more graceful solutions to some of this, but the manual really doesn't describe the process in any detail. My dealer's tech guy has had a little training on it, so he was able to make things work with a little trial and error. But the lack of info in the manual may make the feature unusable without this instruction.
The next hassle we ran into was in creating custom profiles. The list of existing profiles is quite limited. Again, nothing in the manual and the process is very tricky because there are a number of special secrets to getting it to work. (You must save as a special file type, but first highlight the sketch name in the feature tree, and the directory where you have your profiles must be the correct number of levels down)
Finally, creating the cut list is quite cumbersome. There are a zillion pitfalls that even an experienced tech support guy has problems with it. There are some instructions online, but a novice can't hope to follow them.
For our purposes, we just accepted the idea that cut-lists are faster, easier, and more accurately done the old fashoned way (with pencil and paper). The profiles are only a one-time hassle to create, and 95% of our work is simple rectangular tubing anyway.
Ultimately, it is still much easier to create weldments inside SW using this technique than if it were not available. My dealer warned me that it might take another release before the feature is really finished. Our company will buy it, because I occasionally have structures for which I need the engineering data I can extract from the SW model. But for most of our stuff, vanilla AutoCAD will be the best choice.
Joe Dunfee