Congrats on the original video James, 60k views is great. Keep up the momentum, you've found an audience who wants an intellectual discussion about CAD.
I love that sentiment about this problem being a challenge. If we don't challenge ourselves, we don't give ourselves the opportunity to improve. Every little trick we pick up is a new tool for the next project
Another reason for why this is worth doing is that you're finding possible bugs (or improvement opportunities for the CAD makers) that can potentially cost a lot of money for someone in the future.
tl;dr I think if you want your example at 11:00 to work, you need to shrink (stretch?) the inner cylinder drawning by some amount (x direction of path only) (sqrt(r2^2-r3^2) - sqrt(r1^2-r3^2))^2 - (r2 - r1)^2 where r1, r2 is the inner and outer radius of the cylinder, and r3 is the radius of the bit. if you do some trigonometry, you see that the thickness of a straight line cut through a tube depends on the offset of the line from the x=0 center line. The equation of a circle can be seen with y = sqrt(r^2-x^2). Thus the thickness of a cut at some point x, can be determined by the difference in the two circles: t(x) = sqrt(r2^2-x^2) - sqrt(r1^2-x^2), where r1 and r2 are the radii of the inner and outer walls. If you unwrap the tube, then in order for the thickness of the cut to be larger that the thickness of the tube, it needs to be diagonal. We know the diagonal, and we know the thickness of the tube (r2 - r1), thus by pythagoras, the offset of the drawing is the hypotenuse^2 - the height^2: Delta X = t(x)^2 - (r2 - r1)^2. The drill bit or whatever is always perpendicular to the the normal of the cylinder, but that means the thickness at the outer edge of a cut is just a bit thicker than where the center of the drill bit is. Say we are using a constant radius of r3 for the drill bit in the flattened outer plane wall. Then the inner plane wall needs to be shrunk by Delta X(r3), or in total, the drawing should be shrunk by t(r3)^2 - (r2 - r1)^2 which expanded is (sqrt(r2^2-r3^2) - sqrt(r1^2-r3^2))^2 - (r2 - r1)^2. This is only in the X Direction since we are working with a cylinder, not a sphere. It's a little strange, you need to shrink only in the x direction, but not in the y. I'm not a cad engineer, but maybe you can just copy and paste the outer drawing and then shrink it in the x direction, but the shrinkage needs to be centered, such that the path is defined as x=0. For example, say r2 = 2, r1 = 1, r3 = 0.5, then delta X = 0.1459..., thus the radius of path for the inner wall needs to be r3* = 0.3541 along the x direction but still 0.5 in the y direction... like some weird oval / ellipse drill bit that always stays axis aligned.
14:20 that is literally, why Dan called it a "chess problem" as seen in the Wan Show bit in your first video. Why should we think about theoretical problems? Because that's why and how we left the caves.
Both videos are great explanations of the diffent methods and their shortcomings. As a machinist first and a mechanical designer second I actually think these kind of accurate models are super valuable. Having models that are accurate to the real world products is incredibly useful to me and my engineers. Engineers putting in effort like this goes a long way to bridging the long standing gap between the office and the shop floor. It makes my life easier, it helps the engineers get exactly what they wanted, and it speeds up the product development cycle a surprising amount. Thanks for taking the time to share your solution and process.
Hey I'm glad you liked it and thanks for the comment. It's nice to hear that this kind attention to detail is useful because some employers see it as wasted resources
Hey I just found your channel and am loving this. I run into "chess problems" all of the time when trying to engineer a solution in CAD that helps engineers and technicians, both inside and out of the company, visualize an end goal that we are working towards. It is one thing to be able to imagine an end product and know how to do it but that does not usually scale very well outside of a prototyping lab. Sharing knowledge with others in a way that everyone can understand through CAD can opens the door to them running with the concept and it is fascinating when it just clicks for them. Solving the chess problem is surprisingly fun but watching a concept "click" with another person makes it even more rewarding to take on a challenge. Keep up the good work and congrats on all of the new subscriptions!
Thank you for your kind words. That's a good point about sharing knowledge in understandable ways. I have worked with a lot of Chinese manufacturers and when there is a language barrier it can be hard to explain exactly what you want. Making the CAD perfect clears up any confusion with language and makes it visual
I loved this video going through ideas that people think would work but don’t because of just a tiny error. Very helpful to people like myself who are newer to product modeling.
An accurate cad model could be needed for QA reasons. If you just assume that everyone knows that the CAD is not accurate because of this problem, it could end in headaches for the QA. You suddenly need a different process for one part.
For the solid sweep function, you need to use the "CompCurve" or "Composite Curve" command to take the 3 separate curves and combine them into a single curve, then sweep the tool body thru that composite curve.
Hey thanks for the tip. I have never actually used composite curve before so thanks for pointing me towards it 🙂Unfortunately, it also doesn't work. I just tried it. The problem is not that there are multiple curves, they are all connected in one sketch anyway. The problem is that it won't recognise that it's continuously tangent
@@JamesDeBono You could try using a fit spline instead of a composite curve. The tolerance on the fit spline might allow you to smooth out any tangency issues that solidworks thinks it has.
I tried the solid sweep in Inventor and it worked perfectly! Thanks for the suggestion I had no idea that sweeping a solid was an option! The justification for creating accurate models is that many CAM packages today use the model geometry to drive the toolpaths, so accurate edges are important! Also, the solid geometry is often used to check the calculated toolpath to find any areas where there is leftover stock or a gouged part.
Hey I'm glad it worked for you! That's very true about calculating the tool path! Good point. I thought you were going to say it helps for calculating the weight which is also true but less important considering the difference this slot will make 😅
Thanks for making the previous video and this excellent follow-up. Your obsession with getting the CAD right earns my respect, commiserations (it can be a painful and lonely path), and a sub. When wrapping one sketch on the outside face, with an adjusted sketch on the inside, you could fix the height mismatch by using a half ellipse in place of one or both of the arcs. The problem arises because the change between the inside and outside requires a horizontal scaling, but not vertical. This is similar to the problem of creating a helical cut with a specific lead angle: the lead angle changes with radius, becoming steeper as the radius decreases. In extremis, at zero radius, every lead angle reaches 90°. For the solid sweep approach, did you try selecting all three elements of the J and converting them to one spline? Regarding the mid-plane thicken, I've found thicken to be a little less robust than offset. There are certainly times where SW will fail to thicken, but will manage an offset. I suspect it happens when the perpendicular surfaces around the perimeter of the thicken would self-intersect.
Thanks!! Yeah the scaling is to complicated between the 2 arcs I think. It would be really hard to get the scaling perfect. I haven't tried converting to a single spline yet. Yeah thicken can be weird but I also get a lot of failures with offset
Used a very similar approach in Catia when modelling vacuumformed parts for the automotive industry to get the proper milled edges of the final part. Easier for the guy programming the CNC step of routing it out if he can see how the edges were angled. Some companies such as MAN gave zero thought into this and it caused absolute shitshows further down the stream when making the tooling.
I like this. Lots of ideas, good and bad. But you show and explain things really well for us newbies. In the first video, #3 was the way I would have thought to do it, simply because subtracting objects from each other is the only way I know how to cut holes in FreeCAD haha. Would have taken me days of googling to figure out how to curve it lol.
I don't even know where to start with FreeCAD so I commend you there. I have high hopes for them but right now it feels way to rough for my liking. I hope they can rework the UI and at some point have their own "Blender moment" where the software meets the usability threshold for people to take it seriously in the industry and actually start using it because it truly make more sense to do so
I was able to get the swept cut body to work by creating a 3d sketch from the wrapped J curve and using a fit spline over the three segments. I set the tolerance on the fit spline to 0.0001" but I think you can probably go arbitrarily small. Interestingly enough, when I put this geometry and the geometry created by the thicken cut method into an assembly and used a cylinder constrained to follow the path an end mill would follow, none of the geometries were perfect. I got (very small) interferences along the curved sections of the path no matter which method I used to create the geometry. So it seems like these may be producing very close to perfect geometry, but not absolutely perfect to what the end mill actually theoretically cuts. Clearly there are some rounding errors somewhere in the routines that solidworks uses to calculate the offset surfaces (for thicken cut) and the routines for swept cut body, or perhaps in the way that compare is evaluating the bodies.
Nice idea with the fit spline! I want to try that out. Yeah to be honest I'm not totally satisfied with any of the solutions. I think a swept body cut makes the most sense but I just wish it would follow the path. Maybe this is why Dan was saying they were stumped because even with the pretty good solutions it still doesn't feel perfect
Hey I just posted a new video where I tried out the fit spline idea and I also did some interference detection th-cam.com/video/QJ83ShySnVw/w-d-xo.html
I think the best way to check is to make in an assembly and check for interference. You could have the simulated bit follow the path and it will catch the interference.
Great challenge and really interesting to see the updates based on comments. Have you tried using interference detection? It is available in parts, great for checking multi body part files. I tried a few versions of my own and the best result is thickening a ruled surface that is normal to the cylinder face. Looking forward to more challenges.
@@JamesDeBono Yeah I'm unsure when interference detection was added to parts. it's super handy though. I had to stop, ended up with about 4 versions of the challenge. Got the swept body cut to work, but used deform to wrap an extruded J onto the cylinder rather than using wrap.
Hey I just posted a new video where I used the interference detection and a ruled surface th-cam.com/video/QJ83ShySnVw/w-d-xo.html it worked perfectly! thanks for the great suggestions!
I did the swept cut with "tangent to adjacent faces" selected and also the method he described in the video with a swept surface and then thicken cut. I compared the two geometries using body compare and the two methods produce the same end geometry.
Hey cool! that's awesome that you went to the effort of trying it out. Also a nice solution! I think in the end it's a bit more complicated though considering the number of features and manual steps needed. Good point about the simulation, I don't have the simulation package so I couldn't do it. I just posted a new video though where I used interference detection and you can see that my method was almost perfect, but switching the swept surface out for a ruled surface meant that it's fully perfect now and has a really clean feature tree th-cam.com/video/QJ83ShySnVw/w-d-xo.html
What if you created the cylinder, then unfolded it into a rectangle. Created a sketch on one face of the plane and sketched the J. Then created a sketch on the opposite side of the plane and converted the J features, and offset these features outward. Finally lofted cut between these features. This would create a J that is bigger on the inner face than the outer face. When the rectangle is refolded into a cylinder the walls of the J should be parallel. The formula for the length of the offset would be: [Wall thickness of cylinder]*tan([Thickness of J]/(2*[Outer radius of cylinder])) This is assuming the cylinder is unfolded such that the outer surface area is kept constant
Thinking about this further, it is likely that all portions of the walls of the J that are not perpendicular to the circular face of the cylinder will be warped upward or downward. This can be solved by offsetting only the 4 vertical lines of the converted J feature inward or outward, parallel to the top line of the rectangle, by the previously calculated distance. Then re-sketch the curves for the top of the long and short end of the J, as well as the inner and outer curve of the bottom. Note that these will no longer be semicircles and instead be 3 point arcs (ellipses). They should be tangent to both lines with a semi-minor axis equaling the original radius of the semicircle.
@@ericgolub8589 yeah the issue is that one of the arcs will be circular and one will be elliptical and there isn't an easy way to perfectly shape that ellipse based on the other circle arc
This is such an interesting problem because it feels like the tools provided should already be able to accomplish the task, but they just don't. Edit: They "do" but they don't. lol Double edit: Due to fear of being misunderstood, what I mean is that it feels like there should be a specific tool that does this task, rather than a combination of bits of other tools.
I like Solidworks (in contrast to NX or F360) but I just use it occasionally for really simple models. I would just fail at the point to wrap the J curve along the cylindrical body in the first place 😂 What setting is responsible for these relations-arrows in your feature manager? Quite handy for keeping oversight
if you right click the model name at the top of the feature tree, you can see 2 icons you can click called "Dynamic Reference Visualization (parent)" and "Dynamic Reference Visualization (child)". They are super handy! you can check what the children of a feature or sketch are before deleting it so you can see which features would subsequently be deleted if you did
How are you getting the wrapped J path? when I try it, I get an error telling me that I can't wrap open or intersecting contours. This approach with a thickened cut from the centerline surface seems like a good solution to this problem. It's a bummer that the solid sweep option doesn't see to work, as that is probably the most intuitive from the standpoint of mimicking the actual manufacturing process. I have a feeling it has to do with the tangency and curvature continuity of that path. One option that might make that work is to convert your 3d sketch into a fit spline including all 3 segments. Set the tolerance somewhat tight (less than you expect the machining tolerance to be) and see if the solid body sweep will work then.
I also have the error with the J path in SW2019 SP3, so unsure if it is a feature only in newer versions or if it was broken in certain versions that we are unfortunate to have. Really sucks because I actually had a project I would want to use this knowledge on but now can't...
@@blindassassin111 I tried this again in 2023 and it works for wrapping the open sketch, but not in 2022 (or earlier presumably). I made a workaround by duplicating the body I want to wrap onto, closing my sketch profile, wrapping it onto the duplicated body, and then I can use just the edges of the wrap that are relevant to make the swept or ruled surface, then use that surface to make a thickened cut on the original solid body.
I feel that the best way to solve this would be animate the drill following the wrapped J (the drill would need to always be pointing at the center of the radius of the cut object) and at the same time to bollean that animated interaction (basically recreating what you want to do in real life)
What if you unwrap the cylinder, and sweep the bit on a flat plane. However, instead of using a cylindrical bit, use a trapezoid shape that has opposite angle to the one created by the first method you demontrated. I hope I'm making myself clear. Basically, when you wrap up the cylinder, the problem with is that the inner opening is narrower than the outer opening. So why not create a tool that is distorted proportionally, that when wrapped will distort to the desired shape?
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Congrats on the original video James, 60k views is great. Keep up the momentum, you've found an audience who wants an intellectual discussion about CAD.
Thanks man! And thanks for your suggestion about cleaning up the feature tree. It shows you know your stuff too!
I love that sentiment about this problem being a challenge. If we don't challenge ourselves, we don't give ourselves the opportunity to improve.
Every little trick we pick up is a new tool for the next project
Well said! I love that Dan was excited about the thought of solving such a problem even though they didn't need to!
Another reason for why this is worth doing is that you're finding possible bugs (or improvement opportunities for the CAD makers) that can potentially cost a lot of money for someone in the future.
100% I tend to do things like this in my spare time to improve my skills if I don't think that it's necessary for the project
tl;dr I think if you want your example at 11:00 to work, you need to shrink (stretch?) the inner cylinder drawning by some amount (x direction of path only)
(sqrt(r2^2-r3^2) - sqrt(r1^2-r3^2))^2 - (r2 - r1)^2
where r1, r2 is the inner and outer radius of the cylinder, and r3 is the radius of the bit.
if you do some trigonometry, you see that the thickness of a straight line cut through a tube depends on the offset of the line from the x=0 center line. The equation of a circle can be seen with y = sqrt(r^2-x^2). Thus the thickness of a cut at some point x, can be determined by the difference in the two circles:
t(x) = sqrt(r2^2-x^2) - sqrt(r1^2-x^2),
where r1 and r2 are the radii of the inner and outer walls. If you unwrap the tube, then in order for the thickness of the cut to be larger that the thickness of the tube, it needs to be diagonal. We know the diagonal, and we know the thickness of the tube (r2 - r1), thus by pythagoras, the offset of the drawing is the hypotenuse^2 - the height^2:
Delta X = t(x)^2 - (r2 - r1)^2.
The drill bit or whatever is always perpendicular to the the normal of the cylinder, but that means the thickness at the outer edge of a cut is just a bit thicker than where the center of the drill bit is.
Say we are using a constant radius of r3 for the drill bit in the flattened outer plane wall. Then the inner plane wall needs to be shrunk by Delta X(r3), or in total, the drawing should be shrunk by
t(r3)^2 - (r2 - r1)^2
which expanded is
(sqrt(r2^2-r3^2) - sqrt(r1^2-r3^2))^2 - (r2 - r1)^2.
This is only in the X Direction since we are working with a cylinder, not a sphere. It's a little strange, you need to shrink only in the x direction, but not in the y. I'm not a cad engineer, but maybe you can just copy and paste the outer drawing and then shrink it in the x direction, but the shrinkage needs to be centered, such that the path is defined as x=0.
For example, say r2 = 2, r1 = 1, r3 = 0.5, then delta X = 0.1459..., thus the radius of path for the inner wall needs to be
r3* = 0.3541
along the x direction but still 0.5 in the y direction... like some weird oval / ellipse drill bit that always stays axis aligned.
This is very impressive but also quite convoluted 😅
14:20 that is literally, why Dan called it a "chess problem" as seen in the Wan Show bit in your first video.
Why should we think about theoretical problems? Because that's why and how we left the caves.
Very true! And nice way to put it 😅 it's always good to challenge ourselves because there's always more to learn
Also solving theoretical problems leads to practical real world solutions.
Both videos are great explanations of the diffent methods and their shortcomings. As a machinist first and a mechanical designer second I actually think these kind of accurate models are super valuable. Having models that are accurate to the real world products is incredibly useful to me and my engineers. Engineers putting in effort like this goes a long way to bridging the long standing gap between the office and the shop floor. It makes my life easier, it helps the engineers get exactly what they wanted, and it speeds up the product development cycle a surprising amount. Thanks for taking the time to share your solution and process.
Hey I'm glad you liked it and thanks for the comment. It's nice to hear that this kind attention to detail is useful because some employers see it as wasted resources
Hey I just found your channel and am loving this.
I run into "chess problems" all of the time when trying to engineer a solution in CAD that helps engineers and technicians, both inside and out of the company, visualize an end goal that we are working towards. It is one thing to be able to imagine an end product and know how to do it but that does not usually scale very well outside of a prototyping lab. Sharing knowledge with others in a way that everyone can understand through CAD can opens the door to them running with the concept and it is fascinating when it just clicks for them. Solving the chess problem is surprisingly fun but watching a concept "click" with another person makes it even more rewarding to take on a challenge.
Keep up the good work and congrats on all of the new subscriptions!
Thank you for your kind words. That's a good point about sharing knowledge in understandable ways. I have worked with a lot of Chinese manufacturers and when there is a language barrier it can be hard to explain exactly what you want. Making the CAD perfect clears up any confusion with language and makes it visual
This followup video was pure gold!
actually going through the comments and addressing them this way was so nice to watch :)
Thankyou! 😅 and there are still people commenting the same things on the first video
I loved this video going through ideas that people think would work but don’t because of just a tiny error. Very helpful to people like myself who are newer to product modeling.
An accurate cad model could be needed for QA reasons. If you just assume that everyone knows that the CAD is not accurate because of this problem, it could end in headaches for the QA. You suddenly need a different process for one part.
Another very good point! I think accurate CAD is always good if it can be done without too much excessive resources
For the solid sweep function, you need to use the "CompCurve" or "Composite Curve" command to take the 3 separate curves and combine them into a single curve, then sweep the tool body thru that composite curve.
Hey thanks for the tip. I have never actually used composite curve before so thanks for pointing me towards it 🙂Unfortunately, it also doesn't work. I just tried it. The problem is not that there are multiple curves, they are all connected in one sketch anyway. The problem is that it won't recognise that it's continuously tangent
@@JamesDeBono You could try using a fit spline instead of a composite curve. The tolerance on the fit spline might allow you to smooth out any tangency issues that solidworks thinks it has.
As someone who spend so many hours in spline paths in 3D Studio R4 (DOS) back in 1996 I am thoroughly invested in this video series :)
I tried the solid sweep in Inventor and it worked perfectly! Thanks for the suggestion I had no idea that sweeping a solid was an option!
The justification for creating accurate models is that many CAM packages today use the model geometry to drive the toolpaths, so accurate edges are important! Also, the solid geometry is often used to check the calculated toolpath to find any areas where there is leftover stock or a gouged part.
Hey I'm glad it worked for you! That's very true about calculating the tool path! Good point. I thought you were going to say it helps for calculating the weight which is also true but less important considering the difference this slot will make 😅
Thanks for making the previous video and this excellent follow-up. Your obsession with getting the CAD right earns my respect, commiserations (it can be a painful and lonely path), and a sub.
When wrapping one sketch on the outside face, with an adjusted sketch on the inside, you could fix the height mismatch by using a half ellipse in place of one or both of the arcs. The problem arises because the change between the inside and outside requires a horizontal scaling, but not vertical.
This is similar to the problem of creating a helical cut with a specific lead angle: the lead angle changes with radius, becoming steeper as the radius decreases. In extremis, at zero radius, every lead angle reaches 90°.
For the solid sweep approach, did you try selecting all three elements of the J and converting them to one spline?
Regarding the mid-plane thicken, I've found thicken to be a little less robust than offset. There are certainly times where SW will fail to thicken, but will manage an offset. I suspect it happens when the perpendicular surfaces around the perimeter of the thicken would self-intersect.
Thanks!!
Yeah the scaling is to complicated between the 2 arcs I think. It would be really hard to get the scaling perfect.
I haven't tried converting to a single spline yet.
Yeah thicken can be weird but I also get a lot of failures with offset
Used a very similar approach in Catia when modelling vacuumformed parts for the automotive industry to get the proper milled edges of the final part.
Easier for the guy programming the CNC step of routing it out if he can see how the edges were angled. Some companies such as MAN gave zero thought into this and it caused absolute shitshows further down the stream when making the tooling.
Instead a sweep surface you can try a ruled surface normal to cylindrical surface.
Yes! someone mentioned this on the other video. Great suggestion
Hey I just posted a new video where I tried out the ruled surface! th-cam.com/video/QJ83ShySnVw/w-d-xo.html great suggestion! thank you
I'm glad the thicken trick worked as I suggested. :)
Yes it did, that was a nice suggestion! Cleaned things up a lot!
I like this. Lots of ideas, good and bad. But you show and explain things really well for us newbies. In the first video, #3 was the way I would have thought to do it, simply because subtracting objects from each other is the only way I know how to cut holes in FreeCAD haha. Would have taken me days of googling to figure out how to curve it lol.
I don't even know where to start with FreeCAD so I commend you there. I have high hopes for them but right now it feels way to rough for my liking. I hope they can rework the UI and at some point have their own "Blender moment" where the software meets the usability threshold for people to take it seriously in the industry and actually start using it because it truly make more sense to do so
I was able to get the swept cut body to work by creating a 3d sketch from the wrapped J curve and using a fit spline over the three segments. I set the tolerance on the fit spline to 0.0001" but I think you can probably go arbitrarily small. Interestingly enough, when I put this geometry and the geometry created by the thicken cut method into an assembly and used a cylinder constrained to follow the path an end mill would follow, none of the geometries were perfect. I got (very small) interferences along the curved sections of the path no matter which method I used to create the geometry. So it seems like these may be producing very close to perfect geometry, but not absolutely perfect to what the end mill actually theoretically cuts. Clearly there are some rounding errors somewhere in the routines that solidworks uses to calculate the offset surfaces (for thicken cut) and the routines for swept cut body, or perhaps in the way that compare is evaluating the bodies.
Nice idea with the fit spline! I want to try that out. Yeah to be honest I'm not totally satisfied with any of the solutions. I think a swept body cut makes the most sense but I just wish it would follow the path. Maybe this is why Dan was saying they were stumped because even with the pretty good solutions it still doesn't feel perfect
Hey I just posted a new video where I tried out the fit spline idea and I also did some interference detection th-cam.com/video/QJ83ShySnVw/w-d-xo.html
I think the best way to check is to make in an assembly and check for interference. You could have the simulated bit follow the path and it will catch the interference.
Hey I just posted a new video where I tried out the interference detection th-cam.com/video/QJ83ShySnVw/w-d-xo.html great suggestion, thanks!
Congrats on almost 80k views on the last video
Great challenge and really interesting to see the updates based on comments. Have you tried using interference detection? It is available in parts, great for checking multi body part files. I tried a few versions of my own and the best result is thickening a ruled surface that is normal to the cylinder face. Looking forward to more challenges.
Ooh a ruled surface is a good idea! nice work. I thought interference detection was only available for assemblies. I'll have to try that out too
@@JamesDeBono Yeah I'm unsure when interference detection was added to parts. it's super handy though. I had to stop, ended up with about 4 versions of the challenge. Got the swept body cut to work, but used deform to wrap an extruded J onto the cylinder rather than using wrap.
@@AndrewJacksonDesignStudio Deform huh? That's a good idea. I might try this too
Hey I just posted a new video where I used the interference detection and a ruled surface th-cam.com/video/QJ83ShySnVw/w-d-xo.html it worked perfectly! thanks for the great suggestions!
It's challenges like these that you learn the most from. I just started 3d modeling to make a soap tray to 3d print and now i can't stop lol.
I just used a swept cut and checked the option tangent to adjacent faces. It looked good enough.
Then the slope seems to be a little inward but still good enough
I did the swept cut with "tangent to adjacent faces" selected and also the method he described in the video with a swept surface and then thicken cut. I compared the two geometries using body compare and the two methods produce the same end geometry.
I solved it, much simpler than you think i posted a video on it. Great videos love seeing solidworks stuff
Hey cool! that's awesome that you went to the effort of trying it out. Also a nice solution! I think in the end it's a bit more complicated though considering the number of features and manual steps needed. Good point about the simulation, I don't have the simulation package so I couldn't do it. I just posted a new video though where I used interference detection and you can see that my method was almost perfect, but switching the swept surface out for a ruled surface meant that it's fully perfect now and has a really clean feature tree th-cam.com/video/QJ83ShySnVw/w-d-xo.html
@@JamesDeBono nice! yeah the shorter feature tree is more appealing, this was pretty cool wonder what other problems have gone unsolved.
@@prebel3144 good question! I will have to start solving my own design problems again haha
So, for the both end part you use a cylinder to sweep, and for the middle part you use a box to sweep, I think it will remove the problem entirely.
What if you created the cylinder, then unfolded it into a rectangle. Created a sketch on one face of the plane and sketched the J. Then created a sketch on the opposite side of the plane and converted the J features, and offset these features outward. Finally lofted cut between these features. This would create a J that is bigger on the inner face than the outer face. When the rectangle is refolded into a cylinder the walls of the J should be parallel.
The formula for the length of the offset would be:
[Wall thickness of cylinder]*tan([Thickness of J]/(2*[Outer radius of cylinder]))
This is assuming the cylinder is unfolded such that the outer surface area is kept constant
Thinking about this further, it is likely that all portions of the walls of the J that are not perpendicular to the circular face of the cylinder will be warped upward or downward.
This can be solved by offsetting only the 4 vertical lines of the converted J feature inward or outward, parallel to the top line of the rectangle, by the previously calculated distance. Then re-sketch the curves for the top of the long and short end of the J, as well as the inner and outer curve of the bottom. Note that these will no longer be semicircles and instead be 3 point arcs (ellipses). They should be tangent to both lines with a semi-minor axis equaling the original radius of the semicircle.
@@ericgolub8589 yeah the issue is that one of the arcs will be circular and one will be elliptical and there isn't an easy way to perfectly shape that ellipse based on the other circle arc
This is such an interesting problem because it feels like the tools provided should already be able to accomplish the task, but they just don't.
Edit: They "do" but they don't. lol
Double edit: Due to fear of being misunderstood, what I mean is that it feels like there should be a specific tool that does this task, rather than a combination of bits of other tools.
I totally agree! it seems like no combination of features in Solidworks can man a truly perfect result for this problem
I like Solidworks (in contrast to NX or F360) but I just use it occasionally for really simple models. I would just fail at the point to wrap the J curve along the cylindrical body in the first place 😂
What setting is responsible for these relations-arrows in your feature manager? Quite handy for keeping oversight
if you right click the model name at the top of the feature tree, you can see 2 icons you can click called "Dynamic Reference Visualization (parent)" and "Dynamic Reference Visualization (child)". They are super handy! you can check what the children of a feature or sketch are before deleting it so you can see which features would subsequently be deleted if you did
@@JamesDeBono thanks 👍
My boss needs to watch the last 2 minutes of this video! 🤣🤣🤣
Great video!
Just commenting for engagement :)
How are you getting the wrapped J path? when I try it, I get an error telling me that I can't wrap open or intersecting contours. This approach with a thickened cut from the centerline surface seems like a good solution to this problem.
It's a bummer that the solid sweep option doesn't see to work, as that is probably the most intuitive from the standpoint of mimicking the actual manufacturing process. I have a feeling it has to do with the tangency and curvature continuity of that path. One option that might make that work is to convert your 3d sketch into a fit spline including all 3 segments. Set the tolerance somewhat tight (less than you expect the machining tolerance to be) and see if the solid body sweep will work then.
I also have the error with the J path in SW2019 SP3, so unsure if it is a feature only in newer versions or if it was broken in certain versions that we are unfortunate to have. Really sucks because I actually had a project I would want to use this knowledge on but now can't...
@@blindassassin111 I tried this again in 2023 and it works for wrapping the open sketch, but not in 2022 (or earlier presumably). I made a workaround by duplicating the body I want to wrap onto, closing my sketch profile, wrapping it onto the duplicated body, and then I can use just the edges of the wrap that are relevant to make the swept or ruled surface, then use that surface to make a thickened cut on the original solid body.
@@joshwarner5676 This worked for me as well! At least it is possible, albeit somewhat annoying.
@@joshwarner5676 Nice to know about this. A few people have been asking why it doesn't work for them and I was wondering if it's a version thing
I feel that the best way to solve this would be animate the drill following the wrapped J (the drill would need to always be pointing at the center of the radius of the cut object) and at the same time to bollean that animated interaction (basically recreating what you want to do in real life)
That's essentially what the swept-cut with body is. It just won't solve for the path for some reason. Seems like a solidworks bug
What if you unwrap the cylinder, and sweep the bit on a flat plane. However, instead of using a cylindrical bit, use a trapezoid shape that has opposite angle to the one created by the first method you demontrated. I hope I'm making myself clear. Basically, when you wrap up the cylinder, the problem with is that the inner opening is narrower than the outer opening. So why not create a tool that is distorted proportionally, that when wrapped will distort to the desired shape?
This would just move the problem to the bottom of the J
As @hocktoken stated. It would only work for the straight vertical sections of the slot but not the arc with the angle between the slot walls changes
Try fit spline and choose your tolerance.
Fit spline works but the swept cut with body does not. It's too glitchy
what happened to your eye
I got something stuck in it years ago and had it removed. It gets red occasionally probably due to allergies. It's just cosmetic though
damn sorry bro haha @@JamesDeBono