Hello,
My part needs to be filled in the corner of the 4 pipe way design I made but Solidworks will not close the gap. I have tried zooming in and clicking the unchosen lines but I cannot click one of the lines involved. Any advice? (solidworks 2013)
Hi John,
In a few different places on your model there are thin gaps where surfaces should be meeting. One thing that will help you prevent that is to merge results or knit surfaces together as you build them, and then you can close gaps at the same time. Another thing that would help is that as much as possible you should use the actual edges of the existing surfaces as the boundaries for new surfaces you create, rather than making a bunch of 3D sketches and trying to recreate those edges. Sometimes you might still need to create new sketches because you only want to use part of an edge or something, but even then you should use convert entities to match the existing edge rather than trying to draw the same lines on top of existing edges.
Just as an example starting from the beginning let's look at Surface-Fill1. None of those sketches are fully constrained, so there is no guarantee that the edges actually match up to the adjacent cylinders. Those arcs should be created by selecting the cylinder edges and using convert entities, then trimming away what you don't need. Also for Surface Fills you can have all of the borders be within the same sketch, so you didn't need 3 different sketches there, it could all be in one sketch. Better yet, you actually don't need any sketches. You could have done a Surface Fill by just selecting the cylinder edges as the boundary. Using actual surface edges rather than sketches also gives you the opportunity to try Tangent edge settings, which will make the transitions more smooth.
I hope those suggestions help, and maybe you want to try fixing up the model and if you still run into problems post the new part and I can investigate further.
Hi John,
In a few different places on your model there are thin gaps where surfaces should be meeting. One thing that will help you prevent that is to merge results or knit surfaces together as you build them, and then you can close gaps at the same time. Another thing that would help is that as much as possible you should use the actual edges of the existing surfaces as the boundaries for new surfaces you create, rather than making a bunch of 3D sketches and trying to recreate those edges. Sometimes you might still need to create new sketches because you only want to use part of an edge or something, but even then you should use convert entities to match the existing edge rather than trying to draw the same lines on top of existing edges.
Just as an example starting from the beginning let's look at Surface-Fill1. None of those sketches are fully constrained, so there is no guarantee that the edges actually match up to the adjacent cylinders. Those arcs should be created by selecting the cylinder edges and using convert entities, then trimming away what you don't need. Also for Surface Fills you can have all of the borders be within the same sketch, so you didn't need 3 different sketches there, it could all be in one sketch. Better yet, you actually don't need any sketches. You could have done a Surface Fill by just selecting the cylinder edges as the boundary. Using actual surface edges rather than sketches also gives you the opportunity to try Tangent edge settings, which will make the transitions more smooth.
I hope those suggestions help, and maybe you want to try fixing up the model and if you still run into problems post the new part and I can investigate further.