Parts become transparent after scale?

[healthfreak912]

I just scaled a part down to size and one of the faces has become invisible, but still appears in analysis and can be manipulated. Does anyone have any ideas to rectify this?

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

I have no idea why the face became transparent, but you should be able to select it via the Select other option and change it back to solid.

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

Which scaling tool did you use? The SW built-in function or a 3rd party macro?

Have you tried scaling back up? If so did the face become solid again?

Use the Tools > Check function on the original solid. If there is a problem there, the scale function may not be able to deal with it thereby causing the transparency.

That's just a WAG though.

 

[healthfreak912]

I used the SW scale function. Is the third party macro preferable?

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

That depends what you are trying to do.

If you are wanting to create a 'shrinkage' configuration for a casting or injection moulded part, the SW scale tool is good because it creates a feature in the Feature Manager which can be supressed and unsupressed as needed. However, only the pre-scaled dimensions exist. Which can be confusing when trying to edit the scaled part. Uniform or non-uniform scaling can be applied.

If you just want to scale a part from say metric to imperial then the ModelRescaler macro from

http://www.lennyworks.com/solidworks/default.asp?ID=20

would be good. It does not create a feature in the Feature Manger and any subsequent edits use the scaled dimensions. Only uniform scaling is possible with this macro.