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
