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Using Parting Surface

The Parting Surface is part of the SolidWorks Mold Tools. The Mold Tools are addressed in the companion to this book, the SolidWorks 2011 Assemblies Bible (Wiley, 2011).

Using Ruled Surface

Ruled Surfaces are discussed in general in the section on terminology. Here I discuss the topic in more detail, and specifically with regard to the SolidWorks interface for creating Ruled Surfaces.

The Ruled Surface feature in SolidWorks is one of those features that you may never have missed until you see it in action. It is extremely useful for constructing faces with draft, extending faces tangent to a direction, making Radiate Surface types, building molds, and many other applications.

Figure 20.16 shows the PropertyManager interface for the Ruled Surface.

FIGURE 20.16

The Ruled Surface PropertyManager interface

The Ruled Surface works from the edge of a solid or surface body. The feature has five basic types of operations that it can perform:

• Tangent to Surface

• Normal to Surface

• Tapered to Vector

• Perpendicular to Vector

• Sweep

The Tangent to Surface setting is self-explanatory. The Alternate Face option would be available if the base shape had been a solid, with a face filling the big elliptical hole. This would make the Ruled Surface tangent to the bottom face instead of the side.

With the Normal to Surface setting, it tilts up five degrees from the horizontal because the surface is lofted with a five-degree draft angle at the big end, making a Ruled Surface that is normal. Be careful of using this setting because it looks close to what you may be hoping for, but is slightly off. One of the other options may be a better choice, depending on what you are looking for.

The Tapered to Vector setting needs a plane or axis selection to establish a direction, and then the Ruled Surface is created from that reference at the angle that you set. With a combination of the Alternate Side button and the arrow direction toggle button next to the plane selection, you can adjust the cone created by this setting. The interface to make the changes is not exactly clear unless you use this function often, but it does work.

The Perpendicular to Vector setting is a better option than the Normal to Surface setting when the surface has been created with some sort of built-in draft angle. This is also the setting that looks most like the Radiate Surface feature, although it works much better than Radiate Surface.

The Sweep setting makes a face that is perpendicular to the surface created by Perpendicular to Vector. It is as if a straight line were swept around the edge. This is actually a great way to offset an edge or 3D sketch: using the edge of the surface as the offset of the original.

Using Surfacing Techniques

This section serves as a brief overview of some of the techniques commonly used among people who model using surfaces. This section could be the topic for an entire book on its own. In fact, it is the topic of an entire book that goes into far greater detail. You may want to use the SolidWorks Surfacing and Complex Shape Modeling Bible (Wiley, 2008) to continue your SolidWorks education in far greater detail and depth.

Using Up To Surface/Up To Body

Cross-Reference

Chapter 7 contains more information on end conditions such as Up To Surface and Up To Body.

Some modeling situations seem to require elaborate workarounds until you think of doing them with a combination of solid and surface features, such as the part shown in Figure 20.17. This geometry could be made completely with solids, but it would be more difficult. In this case, a surface is revolved, representing the shape at the bottom of the hole, and the cut is extruded up to it. You can follow along with the part from the DVD at Chapter 20 - square hole.sldprt.

Another familiar situation is when you have a feature to place and you want to use an Offset from Surface end condition, but the feature spans two faces. In that situation, you can knit the necessary faces