I am attempting to cut /extrude a relatively intricate pattern ( right now it's a honeycomb pattern but could likely be a circular hole pattern) into a small part. In short- Solidworks is choking on it.
I have tried patterning both the sketch and the feature in order to expand the pattern. The extruded hole pattern needs to expand greatly in order to cover the entire part ( I can only show a portion of the part for NDA reasons). Nevertheless, what is shown is as far as it will go after about 3 hours of experimenting.
Note: I have been keeping an eye on the Windows resource monitor and rarely does it show above 15% usage on the available RAM- and rarely, if ever, pegs the CPU usage ( staying around 25%). Solidworks doesn't freeze or quit-- the operation just fails after about 45 minutes.
Is there a way to simplify the sketch geometry to greatly reduce the calculations needed? ( I have deleted the inscribed circles from the hexagons so far)
What is the most efficient way to execute this?
Thank you
Dan
Hi Dan,
Unfortunately, Solidworks just isn't made for this type of work. You will want to take advantage of mirroring if there is any symmetry involved.
You will want to leave all of that type of work at the very bottom of your feature tree. Depending on what you have to do, you may not be able to get the pattern to fully take.
If that is the case, I would try breaking it up into groups.