SOLIDWORKS Training – Mold Design- working with shut off surfaces

Welcome back; we’re going to talk about SOLIDWORKS training – Mold Design in this article. This is a series of SOLIDWORKS tutorials for beginners. In my last set of entries, I talked about Configurations and how they can speed up your work and increase your flexibility and efficiency. In this article, we’ll take a different tack and talk about some Mold Design questions that I’ve been asked recently.

Lastly you’ll remember that someone asked me how to work with Straddle Faces. First of all, you may be wondering what the heck “straddle faces” are. Well, a straddle face has both a positive and a negative draft. To work with a face that straddles your “grounded” plane, you’ll need to use the split faces option. Then your face will be split into positive and negative sections.

Now let’s get down to the business at hand and talk about shut off surfaces. This is a tool that SOLIDWORKS provides to help you create two complete surfaces—a core surface and a cavity surface. You need this in order to cut your tooling block into separate pieces. Sometimes when you are trying to do this, you’ll need to close any holes in your model first. This is where the shut-off surfaces tool comes in handy. When you activate this tool, SOLIDWORKS analyzes your model and selects edges for you. SOLIDWORKS will prompt you to select chains of edges to identify shut off holes. SOLIDWORKS will let you know when the hole is closed and is now separable into core and cavity.

There are some options when working with the Shut Off Surfaces tool that I’ll review for you here. The Knit option joins each shut off surface into a cavity and core surface. So you end up with two surfaces, the cavity and core surface. If you uncheck this option, you may end up with many different surfaces. You might want to do this, however, if the surfaces weren’t created very cleanly, and you want to repair them manually.

The second option is Filter Loops. This option basically filters out the loops that don’t appear to be valid holes. There is a Show Preview option; this does what it says and gives us the preview in the graphic area. The Show Callouts option displays the callouts for loops in the graphic area.

At the bottom of the tool’s property manager is a section for Resetting All Patch Types. We get four options: All, No Fill, All Contacts, and All Tangent. The first option removes fills (this is the All option). The “No Fill” option gives us the option to choose all contacts. The All Contacts option lets us choose all contacting edges; the fourth option allows us to choose all tangents. Each option shows in preview in your graphic area, so you can tell the difference.

This concludes this entry in our SOLIDWORKS tutorials for beginners series about Mold Design. We’ll pick up from here in our next article.

Here are some videos from our SOLIDWORKS training mold design playlist at youtube:

Thanks! Rosanna D, VTN – www.video-tutorials.net

SOLIDWORKS training mold design