SW mold tools - knitting surfaces

I personally have not had good success with the SW mold tools. I think for anything but the most basic shapes you wind up doing most of the work manually anyway.

Problems with knit could be just about anything, but what I do to troubleshoot knits is to knit faces that will knit, and increase the scope of the knit until you find a face or a group of faces that will not knit. Look for anything questionable. Try to recreate the problem face(s) with an alternate method. Don't count on radiate, extend or ruled surface features, they will frequently create overlaps, sliver gaps or other strange geometry.

I recently had a surface model that also wouldnt totally knit. I saved it out as a Parasolid (.X_T), and then opened it up in SW again. When I opened it, import diagnostics was now an option. Using it, I was able to see where the gaps were in my surfaces.

Note that once to create any feature after importing the model, Import Diagnostics is no longer available, so make sure you know where all your gaps are before you add ANY feature. You can try to use the "attempt To Heal All" feature, but im sure most surface people on here will tell you it rarely works.

Im with Matt on this one, I have not had much success with SW mold tools, and it will be easier to fix yourself.

As far as tolerance of gaps, I dont know of a way to tell SW to allow gaps of a certain amount.

Thanks for the advise guys. I actually already did what you said ("saved it out as a Parasolid (.X_T), and then opened it up in SW again"...). The import diagnostics, while not automatically, did allow me to get to valid surfaces/solids. I ended up doing this for both my core and cavity mold halves. Unfortunately, this work-around leaves me with an unparametric mold, which has no references to the original model where I had defined shrink rate, parting line, etc. Hopefully I won't need to change any of this. Aside from this troublesome part, I have had fairly good luck with SW mold tools so long as the part geometry (often imported from the client) is decent to start with.

Can anybody suggest further advise or reading on this topic??

Thanks,

-JOSH

Even if you import something, you can still update it. When you get a new exported part in parasolid, just RMB on the old imported feature in the solidWorks part and select "Edit feature", and it will let you select a new import file, and will update your solid. There may be problems if you have any child features created from the original imported solid, but it's better than starting over.

In general, there is probably some better solution to your problem than exporting and reimporting. I try to always overbuild surfaces and then trim back, using mutual trim if possible. If that isn't available, then I will try to use the model edges directly that it has to align with. I try to avoid using indirect data to try to match an edge, there are just too many things that can go wrong (making a surface from a projected curve made from converted 2D sketches).

Beyond that, I like to use SplitWorks to split cavity/core because it is far more capable than the built in tools in SW.

Thanks for the additional tips Matt!

-JOSH

I have done several vacuum form molds using the mold tools. Some of these molds had a fairly complex parting line. The mold tools in SW saved me on several occations. The only thing I had trouble with was the shut-off surfaces. I ended up doing those manually. However, anytime I had trouble knitting surfaces, I used -Tools-Check- and selected surfaces. It points out where any problems are in the surface. I could fix those problems and make the knitting work.