How to design the clearance(gap) between mating surface

It's a little difficult determining whether your questions are really SolidWorks questions or are actually injection molding design questions. Are you new to SolidWorks, or new to mold design, or both? I think you'll get more useful answers if you'll re-state the questions.

'Sporky'

there are a lot of ways you could do this

- you could do it while designing in context

- while wondering what to do next

- while sitting on a text

... uh, sorry. it's that damned dr. seuss virus I picked up.

anyway, you can do it feature by feature in context between parts (extrude offset from surface), or maybe once the parts are built do an offset surface from one part to the other and cut with surface, you might even be able to do it in a single part if the mating parts were designed multibody, using a split feature, or, you might wait until some future release of the software where ... uh, can't say.

There are lots of ways to get there, but so far none of them is what you'd call just a magic button push. You might be tempted to use the cavity function or some boolean operation, but that won't work since neither has the ability to do a constant distance offset (only percent scale), the only way I can think of to do something like this is by using the offset or thicken functions with surfaces.

good luck, let us know what you wind up doing

matt

snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com (tomzeng) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com:

Thank you.I am a new Solidworks, product and mould designer.

Tom

Tom,

We've done it several different ways. All have their advantages and disadvantages. Building a base part and then splitting it in two is nice because you know everything matches up and you don't duplicate much work. It has the disadvantage that you can't pull dimensions from the base part for your drawings. Splitting can also be kind of tricky at times. As far as making the gaps, sometimes you can just punch it out of the parts during the split (leaving a little remnant in the base part), sometimes it's easier to split the parts and then cut an offset in one (or possibly both) of them.

Lately we've been using master sketch parts for the outline at the split line, screw locations, and other common features. Then we build both parts from the master sketches. Again, the dimensions from the master sketches don't pull into the drawings, but the other dimensions are still there. One advantage here is that we can split the parts between engineers very early, rather than waiting till one guy gets the base part done.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

That sound good. Thank you. Tom Zeng