newbie trying to draw something

I think you are going about it the correct way. When you cut your hex shape the hex is the closed sketch region. You don't want to cut the inside of the hex you want to cut the material around the outside in which case you would want to check the option "flip side to cut" ( I think this is the terminology...SW isn't in front of me right now) in the cut extrude property manager.

Yes, that's correct, but I'm getting an error that says - "Operation failed due to geometric condition"

I've beat my head against this for hours now, trying all manner of combinations of options. Sketch plan, Surface/face/plane, Blind, Up to surface, Up to body, etc...

I'm just too ignorant to know what I'm doing wrong.

Please help. I'm headed for "postal"...

Best,

Weyland

I bet you have the points of your hex and the edge of your circle coincident with eachother. This is probably causing your error. Either enlarge the dia of your circle or decrease the size of your hex so the points of the hex and the edge of your circle don't touch. It doesn't have to be a large amount just make sure they aren't coincident.

Don't go postal! We might need you in the future.

I tried this, and didn't get any farther.

Dubious. Just another self employed machinist and weldor, here. Seems we're a dime a dozen these days. :)

Any other ideas I can try?

Best,

Weyland

Hang on a minute and I'll send you a file. Are you on SolidWorks 2006?

Best,

Weyland

Not with 2005. if you were on 2006 you could rollback through the features and see what I did. I'll send some screen shots.

Did you receive the screen shots?

Hi Rob,

Yes, I just got them and am looking at them right now, to see if I can replicate this technique here. I'll be right back, shortly.

Thank you~!

Best,

Weyland

Excellent~! Rob, you rock~!

Here's what I had to do, with thanks and respects to Rob - Basically, I had to create the whole part with the revolve function, and then go back and create the hex and cut that. For whatever reason, that works better. (actually, it just works, and that's what matters) (:>)

Very nice.

Thank you Rob. (Also thanks to John, who wrote me privately, trying to help)

Now... tackling the threaded portion... (:>)

Best,

Weyland

I know this is said and done, but I must be missing something as I created a piece of hex bar, then revolved a radiused cut around the top. Worked just fine. Just like you would machine it. Did I miss something?

WT

There are two ways of doing this. Wrap and sweep.

You could sketch the flattened threads onto a plane tangent to the screw cylinder and then wrap-emboss it. I would advise against this method, though, since it is difficult to play with the resulting feature.

Instead, I recommend using a sketched helix and sweeping it. That way, you can define the cross section of the thread, whereas the wrap method only uses a wrapped rectangular prism.

So, insert a helix (using the bottom edge as the source sketch), then draw the cross section at the point where the helix begins. Then simply use the sweep command.

-brad

That would work also Wayne. As always, there are many ways to skin a cat.