Posts Tagged ‘SolidWorks Modeling’

A Way to Stay in the Middle

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

Oreo cookies, grilled cheese, and jelly donuts. What do these things have in common besides tasting great? They all have stuff in the middle. You may have some designs where you need geometry between 2 faces. SolidWorks has a feature that you might not know about. It’s the Mid Surface feature. What it does is create a surface between 2 faces. The surface will move if the two faces move. It is located under Insert>Surface>Mid Surface.

With the surface in the middle, you can thicken it and make it a solid.
This helps build in some “Design Intent” and intelligence into your model.

Josh Spencer

Josh Spencer
Application Engineer
3DVision Technologies

A Rib Discovery

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

So, you know how (in 2009) you can specify the thickness of a drafted rib at the wall interface?  I always figured it found the thickest portion of the rib after the draft was applied and set that to the inputted thickness value…  That’s not how it works though!  It’s actually dependant on the sketch line that it’s created from.  So now, if your rib is going to extend into multiple flat surfaces, it DOES matter where you place the endpoints of your rib’s sketch lines!  To specify the surface that the rib’s thickness value will be applied to, you need to sketch your line so that it does not extend past the boundaries of that particular surface.  Check out the images below…

a_rib_discovery

…The first sketched line will produce unpredictable results because it passes over multiple surfaces.  The second sketch produces the 1.5mm measurement shown in the last image.

Jordan Tadic

Jordan Tadic
Application Engineer
3DVision Technologies