copying a group of features

[antran7]

I've made this boss and all these support ribs, and I would like to copy all these features onto a different face of my part. It'll require a new sketch plane, and be centered around a different sketch circle.

Is there a fast way to do this? I looked in the help files, and it looks like you can only copy&paste in a straight translation type move.

So I did it the hard way. I just manually made the group of features 8 different times.

 

[rockguy]

Library feature or patterning comes to mind but without knowing the exact cicumstances its tuff to say.

Rob Rodriguez CSWP

http://www.robrodriguez.com

SW 2006 0.0

 

[antran7]

Thanks for the reference. I'll look deeper into library features and see if they can do what I'm trying to do.

Here's an example: Suppose we have a solid cube. And on the front face, i've made a protrusion, which references the front face of the cube (my sketch plane), and the adjacent sides (to dimension my sketch). Then off that protrusion, I've made other features that just reference that protrusion.

Can I copy these features to other sides of the cube? Say I want to repeat it so my protrusion and all of its children features stick out of the top of the cube.

The feature copy command can only copy the features onto the same front face of my cube (only varying the sketch dimensions), but I can't figure out how to reference a different sketch plane.

Thanks again...

 

[ctopher]

Select all the features in the feature manager, ctrl-drag to new face. It will make a copy to new face.

Chris
Sr. Mechanical Designer, CAD
SolidWorks 05 SP3.1 / PDMWorks 05
ctopher's home site (updated 06-21-05)
FAQ559-1100
FAQ559-716

 

[antran7]

that worked for some of my features. but I can't get it to work for some of my more complicated ones. It's probably because they reference a surface. Does that kill my feature copy potential? Or is there a work-around?

On one of my features, I protrude clear through a surface, but I use a copy of the original surface to cut back my protrusion (so it's effectively a thru-next type protrusion. the reason i tried to do it this way was to get a bunch of ribs going all the way up to a complex surface in one feature, and the ribs were at different angles)

Peace out!

 

[ctopher]

You can drag the sketch and re-create the features.

Chris
Sr. Mechanical Designer, CAD
SolidWorks 05 SP3.1 / PDMWorks 05
ctopher's home site (updated 06-21-05)
FAQ559-1100
FAQ559-716