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Therefore, SolidWorks is not going to create the entire parting surface for this part automatically. The goal for the Parting Surface tool is to create a surface that looks rectangular from the direction of pull. Most molding dies are rectangular (although some inserts are circular), and you have to be able to describe the surface between the halves of the mold.

FIGURE 21.12

The default-parting surface on the medical device part

Working example

In the following example, a very simple part is created and the Mold Tools process is applied. When the process works as it should, and even when you have to create surfaces manually, you end up with one complete surface body in each of the Mold Tools folders — cavity, core, and parting surfaces. From this, you can see that the parting surface and cavity surface define the top side of the cavity block. Likewise, the parting surface and the core surface define the top side of the core block.

In Figure 21.13, the parting surface is transparent so you can see both the cavity and core surface bodies. The figure may not show this distinctly, but if you open the part from the DVD, it will be very clear.

Using the manual options

SolidWorks 2011 has added some manual intervention options with the Parting Surface tool, specifically because there were very few cases in which the automatic method worked. In this case, it turned out that the manual intervention options worked with less intervention than the default options.

FIGURE 21.13

A completed parting surface

From the disappointing result shown in Figure 21.12, you can just change to manual mode, and change the parting surface distance to 10 inches. The result is shown in Figure 21.14.

There are still some things to change here, and every mold designer might do this differently. One solution is to use the black rectangle as the useful boundary of the surface, and to trim off anything outside of the rectangle. The one thing that definitely has to be changed is the upper-left corner, where the parting line is changing levels and sweeps around the corner at the same time. You will fix this shortly.

Note

If there is a weakness in using manual mode, it is in the connector-like dots shown in Figure 21.15. To get this to work, you have to arrange the pink dots around the perimeter such that none of the black lines overlap one another or the part to be molded. In the area where the inset face curls around the bottom of the part, this becomes difficult, and causes SolidWorks to create bad faces. If you are doing this exercise on your own, try to arrange the pink dots as shown in Figure 21.15. If you see a gap in the surface along the edge, or a place where it appears to overlap itself, this will cause an error in the finished surface. This is not an ideal method for creating tooling surfaces, but it does work.

Although the Parting Surface feature is very slow (this example may take about 30 seconds to process), it is a definite improvement over the default method for any but the simplest mold splits.

FIGURE 21.14

Using manual mode

FIGURE 21.15

Aligning the dots to eliminate overlaps

Repairing the manual mode parting surface

To repair the surface made in the last step:

1. Use Delete Face (with the Delete option) to delete the upper-left corner face. Delete Face can be found on the Surfaces toolbar or through the menus at Insert⇒Face⇒Delete.

2. When you delete the face, right-click the Parting Line feature in the FeatureManager and hide it.

3. Start the Boundary surface from the Surfaces toolbar, right-click in the Direction 1 selection box, and start the SelectionManager.

4. With the SelectionManager open, activate the Select Group option, and select the exposed edge of the mode and the surface edge parallel to the Y direction (no need to hold down Ctrl); then click the green check mark icon on the SelectionManager.

Next, in the Boundary Surface PropertyManager, switch to the Direction 2 selection box, pick the open edge parallel