When making a hole sketch, the 1st thing I need to do often is to put a construction rectangle to place the points. Unfortunately, I rarely need the point in the center, the but center-placed rectangle also places a point which is converted to a hole.
How can I make a center-referenced construction rectangle without it placing the hole in the middle?
Many people here will disagree, but you can do what I do. Create the rectangle in a separate sketch first and leave it visible. Activate the Hole Wizard function and place the points where wanted coincident with the separate sketch. Then hide the sketch. I know that creates an extra feature in the tree, but I don't care. It eliminates the issue you're talking about, and the driving sketch is always right there above the Hole Wizard feature in the tree, so it's easily accessible for editing if the design changes.
I vehemently disagree!
This approach is very aggravating if you are working with files made by someone else and you aren't used to it. You edit the Hole Wizard sketch (like a civilized person ) and see a bunch of points with coincident relations to seemingly NOTHING.
For what it's worth, I typically don't use a construction rectangle at all. I just plop 4 points down and add the appropriate dimensions and relations between them.
Jim,
I can see where it might cause some issues if you're editing someone else's models, but I'm a one-man show here. I'm not editing anyone else's models and no one else is editing mine, so it works very well for me.
After drawing the Center Rectangle (CR), delete the unwanted central point, and use the mid-point of one diagonal to locate the rectangle.
FYI ... If the center of the CR is placed on an endpoint of another sketch element, the center point will not be created.
I use this method also, you can even delete one of the diagonals.
Thank you all for your comments. I was afraid it would be a work-around.
In PTC Creo, you can assign points as construction (hidden within the sketch) or geometry (which makes it a fully accessible datum point outside the sketch). SW could do something like that where points assigned as geometry could be hole locations, and construction points (which center features can be construction by default).
I'm not sure what method I will settle on but for now, thank you again for your insights.
Hello,
Simply delete the centered rectangle's point entity and immediately replace it with a coincident relation between a midpoint of one of the construction lines and the other original spot the point was on (it's the origin in my upload).
The relation isn't a point so it's not added as hole wizard entity.
Cheers,
Kevin
It is a lot faster to just make a normal rectangle (two corners) and add a construction line (diagonal or parallel|2x midpoints) so I can midpoint this new line to the origin.
So far, I am liking the sketch prior to the holes so I can simply add coincident point features in the hole placement. This is a lot like Creo where I can make a point sketch and pattern a single hole to all the points of that sketch.
In that sense, yes, Glenn has what I consider the more robust solution.
Many people here will disagree, but you can do what I do. Create the rectangle in a separate sketch first and leave it visible. Activate the Hole Wizard function and place the points where wanted coincident with the separate sketch. Then hide the sketch. I know that creates an extra feature in the tree, but I don't care. It eliminates the issue you're talking about, and the driving sketch is always right there above the Hole Wizard feature in the tree, so it's easily accessible for editing if the design changes.