SolidWorks 2011 Parts Bible - Matt Lombard [88]
Part II: Building Intelligence into Your Parts
In This Part
Chapter 6
Getting More from Your Sketches
Chapter 7
Modeling with Primary Features
Chapter 8
Selecting Secondary Features
Chapter 9
Patterning and Mirroring
Chapter 10
Using Equations
Chapter 11
Working with Part Configurations
Chapter 12
Editing, Evaluation, and Troubleshooting
Chapter 13
Using Hole Wizard and Library Features
Chapter 6: Getting More from Your Sketches
In This Chapter
Reworking sketch relations
Copying and moving sketch entities
Working with sketch pictures
Creating text in a sketch
Applying colors and line styles to sketches
Overlapping sketch tools
Drawing in a 3D sketch
Editing and copying tutorial
Controlling pictures, text, colors, and styles tutorial
Using metadata tutorial
Sketching calculator tutorial
Previous chapters have described the basic tools for sketching. This chapter takes you to the next level, teaching you about more advanced sketch tools, how to edit and manipulate sketches, and how to work with sketch text, sketch pictures, and sketch colors. At the end of this chapter, with a little practice to reinforce the tools and techniques, you should feel like you have mastered the topic of SolidWorks sketching and can handle almost any problem that is thrown at you.
Editing Sketch Relations
Delete is not an editing option. In time, you will find that this is good advice, even if you don't agree with it now. There are times to delete instead of editing, but you should delete only when it is necessary. In my own work, I sometimes go to extreme lengths to avoid deleting sketch entities, often just to stay in practice, but also because deleting sketch entities, or even features in a part, increases the likelihood that sketch or mate relationships will be broken.
The main reason to avoid using Delete is that when you are editing a sketch that has other features that are dependent on it, the dependent features may lose their references, or go dangling. Because of this, even when you can use the Delete command instead of making edits, it is still a good practice to edit instead. Deleting relations is not as critical as deleting sketch entities, unless the relations are referenced by equations or design tables.
Best Practice
Before deleting sketch entities, try to understand what types of relationships the change will affect downstream. Be sure to consider other sketch relationships within the current part, mates, and in-context relations and even mates in the assembly, and things of this nature. In fact, it is best to have all of this in mind when you are creating relationships to begin with. Try to make relations to the most stable entities available, which usually means having sketches and reference geometry entities as high up in the tree as possible.
Using Display/Delete Relations
Display/Delete Relations is your primary tool when dealing with sketch relations. It is particularly useful for sorting relations by the various categories shown in Figure 6.1. The capability to show sketch relations in the graphics window is nice; sorting them in a list according to their state makes this feature even more useful. To show the sketch relation symbols on the screen beside the sketch entities, use the menu selection View⇒Sketch Relations.
FIGURE 6.1
The Display/Delete Relations PropertyManager
Sketch relations in the Display/Delete Relations dialog box can be divided into the following categories:
• All in this sketch. Shows all the relations in the active sketch.
• Dangling. Shows only the dangling relations. Dangling relations appear in a brownish-green or olive color, and represent relations that have lost one of the entities that drives the relation. You can repair dangling relations by selecting the entity with the dangling