Tuesday September 1, 2015 at 10:40am
Solidworks has many tools and functions that make designing and building parts easy. Including; converting entities, Mirroring, and the boss and extrude tools etc. In this blog I’m going to be talking about the convert entities tool.
Sometimes it may be necessary to covert a sketch onto or
offset from another plane or surface. This could be to copy a fully defined
sketch and replicate it at certain distance so that it can be made into a 3d
feature without the need of having replicate the sketch from the beginning. Or
if the need of creating a new plan to extrude boss/cut from if the sketch is
converted onto a face.
The first thing you
need in order to convert entities is a fully defined sketch on a face/plane.
Once you have a fully defined sketch,
simply click the face you would like to convert the entitles to then click the
convert entities tool on the tool bar in sketch mode.
Select the entities you would like to
convert. Either from the design tree or by clicking on the lines. And click the
tick box.
This can initially help to speed up the overall building
time of a part, however it can also help to reduce the amount of time and
effort needed when changing dimensions or redesigning a part after the part has
been fully modelled.
If entities of a sketch have been converted and the user
decides to change the dimension of the original sketch, then the dimensions
that have been changed will also change on the sketch that has been converted.
This is because both sketches are in relation to one another. This can be
particularly useful when designing bracket or parts that need to be adjusted
depending on where they are going to be situated in real life.
For example:
The size of the holes
in the cube are too small and need to be made larger.
If I increase the dimension from a diameter of 30 to 35. The
holes should increase in size on both sides.
Left:
Right: