Bizarro circular pattern

[MesaTactical]

I am trying to use circular pattern of bodies with SolidWorks 2010 SP4.0. The axis of the pattern I want to use is a line along the Z axis. However, when I tell SolidWorks to use this axis, it instead makes a pattern based on a line along the X axis that passes through the center of the axis I have defined.

As you can see, I get the same pattern using the Z and X axes:

Circular pattern around the Y axis works fine.

Can anyone tell me what's going on here?

 

[bstones]

weird..I'm not sure why it would do that. But if you create a new axis by choosing the 'Top' and 'Right' planes as the references, this replicates the 'Z' axis. Use this as your rotational reference. Should work from my experiences.

 

[MesaTactical]

Well, I did some noodling around and have determined the problem has something to do with whether the plane on which the axis is sketched is one of the cardinal planes or not.

When the axes were sketched on the front plane (the X and Y axis examples above), everything worked fine. But out of necessity I had to sketch the Z-axis on a reference plane parallel to the right plane. BLAM, it didn't work. When I tried sketching on a reference plane parallel to the top plane, I got an even more bizarre result.

So I gave up and instead discovered there is a rotate function with the Body Copy/Move feature. That function ask for a vertex instead of an axis and then allows you to enter the rotation desired around the vertex on any of the three axes.

Worked fine.

 

[dgowans]

In your original pattern (the one that was giving the weird results), am I reading correctly that your pattern axis was a sketch entity?

I'm not sure why a sketch entity wouldn't work, but would it be possible to create your axis via reference geometry (intersection of two planes or something similar)? You might end up with better results, but I have no clue why. Just a thought.