from Library to Palette Feature for a custom hole chamfer. How ?

Apr 05, 2004 3 Replies
P

A customer (famous watchmaker) does special chamfers on many holes : the generated face is concave, spherical (radius =1.5 mm) and the outer edge is 120% the hole diameter. See how it looks on

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managed to make a library feature (lfp) to do this "automatically". I'm proud of it because it uses a trick to adjust and stay associative to the hole size ;-) (you cannot use equations in lfp's, can you ?) you can grab it from
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Now the problem : I want to make it a palette feature so that the customer can simply drag it to his hole edges. This requires to have a single reference (the edge) while my library feature currently has 2 more:



1) a ref plane, which apparently (why?) is required to build the 3D sketch containing a single point with the hole center
2) a ref plane required to generate a parallel refplane through the center on which to sketch the profile

I tried to use aref point to make the center, but those cannot be linked to references in lfp's (no "add to library" choice in menu) In short, the problem is to generate a plane across any diameter of my hole edge without using any other reference... Or can you think of a different way ? (ideally, the diameter dimension and



1.5 mm should appear on any section view...)
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C

I have found that you can do this. You have to make sure that the equation only references other Library Features only. I had an instance where I wanted an equation to reference the diameter of the hole that is used as one of the references. This was to keep a flattened profile of the hole updateable (making the circunferences equal) To accomplish this I created a sketch that contained a circle that was constrained to the edge of the hole and added a driven dimension to the constrained circle. Then I used the driven dimension to drive the equation. Then magically the equation appeared in my model when the Library feature was applied. (If you delete the library feature from your part you will have to delete the equations also or you get an equation error because it references things that are gone)

Did you constrain the point to anything a surface or something.

If you can add the equation is this all going to still be necessary? Anyway you could use your 3d sketch and add a point that is constrained to the edge of the hole (or the surface) and use the edge and the point to create a normal plane

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P

Great! I must admit I didn't even try...

yes, the point is constrained to the edge's center

I think so. the equation is nice to set the "chamfer" diameter to 1.2 x hole diam. but I don't see how it could help in avoiding references to planes... I tried

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) to use a sketch 3D to build the reference geometry (center, axis) from the edge alone, but it becomes dangling when placed in a part...

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C

OK The sketch that I was talking about that is a convert entity of the hole for the equation. Draw a Centerline from center to the edge. Use the face of the part and the centerline to create a Refplane at an angle of 90%. I don't to make it a Palette feature you will have to add the cut-extrude to the library and not constrain it to anything. If you do that you may not need the extra sketch to reference the hole diameter, but it can't be applied to old holes.

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