I noticed that at some point during the 2013 service pack series that hole wizard stopped creating a hole in the center of a center-point rectangle sketch. I don't know exactly how they did this but I know it was around for a short period of time. Our current installation of 2014 SP3 is back to how it used to be and creates the undesired hole in the center. Did anyone else see this feature work this way and then stop working? Are there any fixes for it in the newer versions?
Thanks
hi dmitry, my work college richard and i have managed to create a work round on this.
in the hole wizard select the face then use the corner rectangle or the polygon shapes.
these don't create center points and if you use construction lines to center them to your part it doesn't leave a point for a hole! then just drop points onto the corners you want.
I have noticed this as well. You can delete the centerpoint on the rectangle and make the midpoint of the crossing centerline coincident to where you would like the rectangle located. This is what I have been doing.
That's what I do too. It's kind of annoying that they put the center there in the first place.
I consider myself fairly SW savvy, but I don't have a clue what you guys are talking about. I've read Dmitry's post several times and just don't get it. Can someone explain?
If you use a rectangle sketch with the included midpoint centerlines it puts a sketch point in the crossing point.
Therefore if you use the Hole Wizard along with this type of rectangle sketch it will put an instance right there.
So, you have to get rid of it otherwise you have an extra tap or whatever you're hole wizarding.
The centerpoint rectangle puts a point at the origin of the rectangle and if that lands on a part it will put a hole there.
@Dennis
if you want to add a reference sketch when creating hole positions, if you sketch on the surface when placing the hole points, the rectangle or circle creates a center point , this then ends up ad an additional hole when you click out, so for example you want 6 holes on a pcd youll end up having 7 as the centre will become a point!
hope this helps
Mark
Dennis,
They're referring to using the Centerpoint Rectangle sketch tool when creating the sketch for the hole placement in the Hole Wizard. Since the Hole Wizard places a hole at each Point, it automatically places one at the center of the rectangle, and it may not be desired. In the screenshot below, using the Centerpoint rectangle easily keeps the hole pattern centered on the origin, but it also places a hole at the center when they are only wanted at the corners. As I said in my post above, this is one of the reasons I usually create a sketch first, then activate the Hole Wizard and place points where wanted on the separate sketch
Thanks Glenn. It took me awhile but I finally figured it out. I hadn't realized that the sketch tools were available while placing holes. I've always done as you indicated and placed the sketches prior to activating the hole wizard. Now I have to figure out why it might be a good idea to sketch while placing holes.
Yes, i believe a better practice is nesting your hole wizard sketch within hole wizard rather than a separate sketch outside of the hole wizard feature. It does depend on how the rest of your work group likes do this, if one person out of the group like one way vs. the other it can cause confusion when others are working on your models. It also reduces the number of features in your feature tree keeping the assembly cleaner and straight forward.
I've used all of the work around options and they work well.
In talking with our solidworks service provider they say that they don't recall the feature being fixed at any point in time. By fixed I mean that it does not place a hole feature at the initial center-point rectangle insertion point. The only way I can prove that this was fixed and potentially suggest it gets fixed in future versions is to find the exact version and service pack where this didn't occur. Otherwise, for now we will use the work arounds.
Thanks everyone.
Dmitry Mikailenko wrote:
Yes, i believe a better practice is nesting your hole wizard sketch within hole wizard rather than a separate sketch outside of the hole wizard feature. It may be a better practice, but I'll keep doing it my way. I've tried both ways and like mine better.
It does depend on how the rest of your work group likes do this, if one person out of the group like one way vs. the other it can cause confusion when others are working on your models. I am a workgroup of one. No one else works on my models.
It also reduces the number of features in your feature tree keeping the assembly cleaner and straight forward. I don't mind one more feature in my tree.
It also reduces the number of features in your feature tree keeping the assembly cleaner and straight forward. I don't mind one more feature in my tree.
If you have a part to which multiple parts are to be attached, and each part has multiple different hole types & sizes, that "one more feature" soon creates an unnecessarily long tree. It would be nice if the HW would simply utilize & absorb pre-existing hole position sketches.
I don't think the clutter of the extra sketch is a problem. But the main reason that I prefer the sketch to be defined within the hole wizard feature is because if you want to edit the hole placement it could be difficult to find the sketch that you need to edit. If it is within the hole wizard feature it is easy because you can just edit that feature or edit the hole placement sketch with the feature. If the sketch was done previously then when you edit the hole wizard sketch all you'll see is a bunch of coincident relations. Then you have to backtrack through the tree and figure out where the "master" sketch is.
If you have a very good feature naming system, or you always place the "master" sketch right before the hole wizard feature then that may not be a problem for you. Or of course if you are perfect and never need to change the placement once you've created the feature :-).
I can't answer your question directly. Sorry about that. I revised my workflow for using the Hole Wizard several years ago because of issues like that. Now I create a separate sketch first, then close it out, activate the Hole Wizard function, and drop the points coincident with positions on the sketch.