can't insert 'simple hole' on a plane. Is this true?

Pick the plane first, then pick the Hole Wizard.

Mike

Hi Mike,

I was talking about a 'simple hole' not a hole wizard hole. Sorry for the confusion. The simple hole feature insists on a planar face to pick. Which is just somehting I'd never noticed before.

Zander

You can make the hole on a face and "edit sketch plane" to move it to a plane.

... although if you do that, you run a 50/50 chance of the feature not working. You can't change the direction of the hole cut extrude, and you can't directly control the plane normal. Since solid face normals always point out, and cuts always go in, the cut will always go to the "red" side of the plane (which you can see if you use shaded planes). There has been discussion here before about plane normals, some of it interesting, none of it really helpful. The only way to get a plane you can use where you have a plane you can't use is to draw a line and make a plane at an angle through the line at 180 deg from the unusable plane. This will flip the plane normal and make the cut go the right way.

...well, ok, there is another trick.

- create hole on face

- edit sketch plane to a plane where you want it

- (hole cuts air)

- edit sketch plane to some other plane, say perpendicular to the desired plane

- edit sketch plane back to the desired plane

- (hole cuts solid)

The series of changes combined with some twist on the right hand rule makes the sketch normal flip opposite the plane normal. Useful? Doubtful. Interesting? A little. Odd? Definitely. We've been asking for tools to control plane normals or at least to remove limitations like this one imposed by plane/face normals for a while now.

Matt

Hole wizard used ot have this limitation too, a long time ago. Simple hole was probably not updated from lack of use. IIRC, it's nothing more than a cut-extruded circle, which is my suggestion for a workaround.

appears that sw2005 was the same way.

you can select the plane, create sketch, draw a circle, do cut

i think it's always been that way, actually.

bill

I agree with Dale with the lack of use of the simple hole feature. Why would you not use a hole wizard instead? (That way you can change the type of the hole if need be some time in the future).

Or, make a macro that draws you a circle and dimensions it?

Bigger issue is why we do not have any normal selection/control option for planes? Also, plane management is really non-existent in Solidworks which makes it somewhat annoying to work with for complicated parts.

The hole wizard only goes upto 1" holes I believe. So, sometimes the simple hole wizard has a use, although I agree it's hard to justify as it hardly differs from a cut-extrude.

The hole wizard database only goes upto 1" dia. , if you key in an override, it will still display whatever you selected ie. 1" even if you keyed in 2", so it makes the feature manager a little misleading. It's like in older sw versions, if you had a 6-32 tapped hole and editing the feature to make it 8-32 then 50% of the time the feature manager would still show 6-32 so you would have to manually edit the feature manager name.... On big parts these things can cause confusion, also I use the 'number of mouse clicks required' method to ascertain efficiency of any operation. Speaking of which, I had a great break timer once (which I lost and can't remember the name of) that logged mouse clicks in a given day and also distance travelled by the mouse as well as 'efficiency of travel' ie if you were wandering your mouse around the screen not clicking but being indecisive it would know.

I would average over a 1km of motion per day - I forget the number of clicks but it is high. I use the windows setting that makes a single click a double click for windows operations - helps a lot.

If you cant tell I've been working all weekend, day & night..... !!!!

Zander

The hole wizard database only goes upto 1" dia. , if you key in an override, it will still display whatever you selected ie. 1" even if you keyed in 2", so it makes the feature manager a little misleading. It's like in older sw versions, if you had a 6-32 tapped hole and editing the feature to make it 8-32 then 50% of the time the feature manager would still show 6-32 so you would have to manually edit the feature manager name.... On big parts these things can cause confusion, also I use the 'number of mouse clicks required' method to ascertain efficiency of any operation. Speaking of which, I had a great break timer once (which I lost and can't remember the name of) that logged mouse clicks in a given day and also distance travelled by the mouse as well as 'efficiency of travel' ie if you were wandering your mouse around the screen not clicking but being indecisive it would know.

I would average over a 1km of motion per day - I forget the number of clicks but it is high. I use the windows setting that makes a single click a double click for windows operations - helps a lot.

If you cant tell I've been working all weekend, day & night..... !!!!

Zander

How do the legacy holes in the HW compare on the number of clicks? It should do well on blind holes that should have the drill point on them.

I admit to never having used legacy holes in the HW - hmmmm....

Zander