From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2024 Essential Training

Using the Shell command - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2024 Essential Training

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Using the Shell command

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- [Instructor] The Shell Command is a great and powerful tool inside of SolidWorks. It allows you to take a, any shape you want really and thin it into a thin wall part, right? So something like a injection molded part would be a great thing to use a thin wall for, or maybe a thermal form part or something like that. Using that shell command allows you to turn that into a thin wall part very quickly and easily. Let me show you how it works. So here's my first part. It's just the basic part. And if I come up here to Shell, so under features, head over here to Shell, which is right over here, click on that and it's going to hollow this out. So the first question's asking is, what is the thickness of the wall that I'd like to use? And right over here, I can then just select the faces that I want to remove. So in this case, I probably want to remove the bottom right, and I have the option of shelling it outward or inward. But right now let's just get a preview of what's going on. So it's going to thin this out to being that a hundred thousands wall and click okay and see what happens. All right, so there it is. It looks really good. So very straightforward, very basic. If you're using the shell command, I would definitely recommend Filleting after you shell, because fillets can cause a lot of trouble for when you, when you do shell, they actually will cause a lot of problems. So you might want to shell it, unless it's a really large fillet, try to fillet it after you shell it. That definitely will save you some time and effort. And let's go ahead and cut this thing in half. Here is my section view. You can see exactly how you go through here. And everything is a uniform wall thickness of that a hundred thousands. I want to show you a couple things also that can mess this up. So over here under Shell, if you start getting this too big, right? So watch what happens. I start making this a bigger and bigger, bigger thing here. And at some point in time, it's either going to fail or you're not going to get what you want. So in this case here, like I was able to keep increasing that, and now you just have this little section that's been removed down here, because I've made the walls so thick. Now I want to show you another thing that can be an issue as well. And this time I'm going to go back to the hundred thousands or the 0.1 actually. All right, and there's our wall thickness. Now, before we do the shell, let's go ahead and add in a fillet. So here's a fillet, and let's go ahead and fillet all these tops corners here, click Okay. All right. Oh, you know what? That's not the type of fillet that I want. I don't want a clonic radius. I want to a circular fillet, click Okay. And there it is, all right. So there is our fillet. Now we come down here to the shell command, right? And guess what, it does shell it just fine, because, and if I look at this one here, you can see I've got a nice little shell. No problem, right? Well, what happens if I keep making this fillet bigger and bigger, right? So I go, you know, let's make this thing. At some point in time that fillet's going to fail, right? So, and right at this point here, so 0.2, as soon as I go to 0.3, it fails. So go down to 0.2, let's change that to actually 0.25, see what happens there. So there we can do that, no problem. And then the shell command works just fine as well. But what happens if I make that shell a little bit bigger? So boom, boom, as soon as I get to that point here, and when it gets to 0.3, notice it completely fails. Or you get some weird thing that happens. So look over here. Look, look, look at that. You've got this weird thing that's happened now because of these fillets, and it doesn't fill anything on the side over here. So this is what you want to avoid, right? So try to not add fillets ahead of time when you're using the shell command. All right, now I want to show you one more example here, right over here. And this one's like a bottle, right? So you made a bottle. Now you want to hollow out the bottle. Pretty straightforward. Come over here to Shell and choose the faces you want to remove. So I'm going to remove the top of the bottle and let's make it like a quarter inch thick and click Okay. All right, now I've got a bottle, and if I use the section view, I can come in here and take a look at what it looks like. So pretty straightforward there. And then if you also want to go back and modify that shell, right? Notice I'm only choosing the one top surface, but I can remove other surfaces. I can take the bottom out, no problem, I can do that. And so now I've got more like a tube, right, I can say, Hey, top and bottom have been removed. That's fine. And you can continue to take that even further than that. Remove this, remove that, no problem. Take them all out. So now all of a sudden, all those faces have been removed, and now you have a shell of just this one little section here. So you can definitely play with and modify those tools as you go. And you notice this one is using big radiuses, so you shouldn't really have an issue. But if you are using small radiuses, sometimes that will def definitely cause some issues with Shell. So try to add those Fillets, radiuses and things like that towards the end of your part after you've already done the shell.

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