Funnel Vision

Tuesday January 28, 2014 at 11:46am

06 Tech Tips

, 03 SOLIDWORKS 3D

, 10 General Posts

A simple yet powerful feature introduced on the SOLIDWORKS Essentials Course is the shell feature. This allows you to remove faces of a part and apply a uniform wall thickness within it, particularly useful for injection moulded product. By delaying the stage at which we use the tool we can use it to enhance internal details from external ones, in this case bosses and fillets. What's more the shell feature can also product multiple thicknesses in different areas of a model for further reinforcement- i.e. the neck of a bottle.

I have created a simple funnel product; in the image below it has already been shelled out with the ‘inlet’ and ‘outlet’ faces removed.

In the following image, fillets have been added externally on the sharp edges before the shell feature, and as a result they have been passed on as internal detail during the wall thickness, notice the yellow faces. This is a simple ordering change that may save time calculating or guessing the correct internal fillet radius.

Why not use the feature after adding circular bosses and removing multiple faces in one command? In the following image I have added circular bosses out from the funnel. By removing all of the ‘outlet’ faces the shell tool effectively produces the channels within the part without any calculation. Looking closely, notice the internal channels also follow the draft angle of the circular bosses.

We can again go one step further, by adding fillets externally to the part before the shell feature, as a result making them appear on the inside also, see the internal yellow faces on the image below.

By Ben Garrett

Applications Engineer

Related Blog Posts

PDM Video Guides

If you're looking to learn how to use PDM more efficiently then check out this series of short guide videos. A range of useful topics are covered including creating backups, configuring user permissions and exporting to XML.

3D Experience - Dashboard Creation

Without Dashboards your 3DEXPERIENCE platform will be pretty empty so we need to understand what can be done with them on a per user basis and also how they can be shared to the rest of the team. In simple terms the dashboard is the layout of the web...

3D Experience - Overview and Gaining Access

3DEXPERIENCE allows you to bring together colleagues and invited suppliers into a single web based platform allowing ideas to be shared and decisions to be made. The platform is CAD intelligent so will allow storage and viewing of your 3D models, eve...

Website by Zarr

Top