SOLIDWORKS Extra Credit

This is a series best paired with our training courses. There are some topics where we like to expand or people often ask questions and there might not be time for our instructors to cover it, we encourage you to have a read through this series along with your course to get the most out of the experience!

Q: The Protective Screen case study, step 8 on page 30 (Version 2022), mentions an alternative method to using the mirror body to work, can we see what that would look like?

This is an important alternative approach because it would be required if our part wasn’t symmetrical and will still work on symmetrical parts.

The idea behind this approach is that we create two ribs on different planes because we don’t want the ribs to interfere with each other.  Our first rib must therefore be moved to a new plane below the surface of the part. The second rib will be created on the original surface and therefore be able to extend over the first rib. Remember this won’t affect our result because this geometry is being used as an intermediate step to be used with Boolean operations.

This process is assuming you already made your first rib on the surface as we’ve done in this case study, if you were using this approach from the beginning, we would skip steps 1, 3 and 4.

1. Drag the rollback bar before the Rib feature.
2. Create a plane offset from the rib-sketch plane, the offset value isn’t important as long as it doesn’t interfere with anything else in the model’s creation.
3. Drag the rollback back bar back to the end.
4. Edit the sketch plane of the rib sketch and select the newly created plane.
5. Create a second rib to be patterned as desired, in our case it will be perpendicular to the first rib.
6. Pattern the rib and because it’s on a different plane it will be able to spread over the first pattern and give us our screen pattern.
7. Now you can continue your part as normal with the pattern feature option.

Between these two approaches you should have no problems setting up these types of Boolean operations! Check out the previous article in this series.