i have digitised a helmet with a microscribe and imported it into abaqus, problem is its 100 times too big, importing it into scale makes the part invalid which cannot be repaired, can you scale parts after importing?
I find it better to do the scaling in the CAD package used to create the geometry. Once you scale a part significantly it seems that CAE determines that the part is invalid as you have found out. My guess is that it is related to the SAT format having 1e-6 as it's resolution and with scaling that errors pop up. I hope this helps.
If it's possible in your specific system you can also just change the units of the materials,loads,... In systems that I look at this is usually the easier and cleaner way to get around this.
You can prepare model with current lenght units and all material propertis for correct size. Next add *NMAP keyword to keyword with SCALE option and scale all nodes coordinates.