From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2024 Essential Training

Positioning holes in 3D - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2024 Essential Training

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Positioning holes in 3D

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- [Instructor] The whole wizard works in a couple of different ways. Now, you've already seen us use the whole wizard on some flat surfaces, but now in this video, I want to show you how we can use it in 3D. Now, if you haven't already selected a face, don't, right? What I want to do is I just want to go into the whole wizard. And in this case, I'm going to choose something like a antsy inch. Let's come down here, and actually, we're going to do a tap hole. So, switch over to a tapped hole. Bottom tap hole looks fine, quarter 20 looks fine. In condition, let's go ahead and say we want to make it blind, and I'm going to make the hole 0.75 inches deep, and we're going to tap it to half of an inch, that looks fine. And go ahead, and we're going to be calling this out as a tapped hole, we're showing the cosmetic threads. That looks fine. Third class, sure, 2B lit looks good. Okay, once you've got the hole you want, no big deal. Switch over to positions, right? So, now we have the existing part, but I don't have any kind of layout sketch on there, so I can choose a 3D sketch. Click on 3D sketch, and now wherever I put a point, right? It's going to automatically put a hole. So, click over here or come over here to another face. And notice it's highlighting these faces in gold. Click on that face. I can spin my model around in any 3D face, I want to, I can add a hole. The problem is, it's kind of hard for me to determine where in 3D space these holes are being placed. I know it's on that face, but I don't really have a lot of control of where it is. Now, a couple things I could do, I could turn off the point command. I could come over here to something like a center line command, and I could snap to like a corner of this part over here, snap to the corner right here. And then I could say, "Hey, let's go ahead and take this point here and select the line right there, and say, 'Hey, let's go ahead and make that midpoint.'" So, now I'm controlling it like that, that makes sense. And I can continue doing that around my part, right? So, I can keep going over here 'cause I'm drawing effectively in 3D, so I'm snapping to points. So, snap from here to there. And then, I can again grab this little point here, put it over here and say, let's make those midpoint. So, I'm controlling the ones on the outside pretty easily, but what if I want to control some that are on like the top surface here, right? Like, where am I going to put this? Now of course, I could draw in this mode if I wanted to, or I can go ahead and make a sketch ahead of time that I'm going to snap to. I've already showed you how you can draw in this mode here, but let's go ahead and click OK, and then exit out of this, and Accept it. And I notice this counter sink we have here goin' on? It's really not what we wanted, so we have to go back and fix that. But right now, let's go ahead and create another sketch. So, I want that sketch to be before this feature. So, here's the feature. If I draw it now, it's going to show up below that feature, and it's not going to work. So, I need to make that sketch prior to creating these holes. So, you have this little history bar right here. You can grab that history bar, drag it right above that feature. And now, let's go ahead, click on the top surface and start a sketch. So right over here, I'm going to create a polygon, and I'm going to snap to the center point and go up here. And then, go ahead and make this line here horizontal. And if you're feeling fancy, you can go ahead and add a dimension, something like that, let's say two and a half. Okay? Now, you can convert this to construction geometry if you'd like to, but it doesn't really matter. I'm just going to exit out, and that's what I'm going to use is my layout sketch. Now, when I roll my history bar back down, notice, I'm back to the mode I was. Go ahead and edit that feature, and let's go ahead and fix this little counters sink condition, let's turn that off, or if you don't want to turn it off, let's go ahead and near side countersink, but let's make it a lot smaller. So, if it's like .26, might make sense. So, just adding a little edge break to the top of the hole. Now, come over here to positions, right? And now, right on my tool tip again, is that point. Anywhere I want to snap a little tapped hole, I just click and snap to those corners. And there you can see, we can easily quickly add in 3D, all those holes, right? And if you want to add more on the other faces, you could. And if you don't like a couple of these holes, just hit Delete on your keyboard, select them, hit Delete, hit Delete. And if you missed one like this one here, come back, grab it. And then, all those should be fully defined as black dots, means they're fully defined. And now, we click on the green check mark, and we've got all those holes positioned by this sketch, or from sketches that we actually added inside of the 3D Sketch tool.

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