SOLIDWORKS Video Tutorials Supplements for Beginners: Mold Design Questions Part 2

Welcome back to our series of SOLIDWORKS video tutorials supplements for beginners. We’re still talking about some basic mold design questions. We were discussing working with shut off surfaces, where SOLIDWORKS patches a hole up for you, so that you can separate your mold into cavity and core.  Taking a look at the Resetting All Patch Types option at the bottom of the Shut off Surfaces tool property manager, we see four options: All, No Fill, All Contacts and All Tangent.

We’d left off right at working with the All Contacts selection. Now, if you’re thinking to conveniently use the All Contacts option in one shut off surface, and then use the All Tangents option for a second shut off surface, and that this will solve the problems in your model, think again! This won’t work because only one shut off surface feature is permitted per model.

After you click OK to accept the shut off surface, take a look at the feature manager design tree. Expand the surface bodies folder, and you’ll see two sub folders now. One is called Cavity Surface Bodies and the other is Core Surface Bodies. Let’s hide the surface in the Cavity Surface Bodies folder. Now, take a look at the ribbon—notice that the shut off surfaces tool is no longer available. It’s grayed out on the ribbon because we can only use one shut off surface feature per part, as you’ll remember.

This concludes our discussion of shut off surfaces, in our series of SOLIDWORKS video tutorials supplements for beginners. Stay tuned for our next article.