From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2021 Essential Training

Making revolved cuts - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2021 Essential Training

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Making revolved cuts

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- The revolved cut feature allows us to take a basic shape and revolve it around a center line to create a cut into parts or multiple parts. So let me show you how it works. First thing I need to do is create a sketch and I have a plane right here, which is the right plane, which goes right through those two parts there. Click on that one. Let's go ahead and fire up a sketch. I'm going to ahead and start with a circle and I'm going to snap it right here to the mid point of the ending line there. And let's go ahead and then show you what's going to happen. So right now, if I were to create a regular cut, an extruded cut, it would go through the part and you can have multiple options here as far as like midplane. And we can define how big that is going to be. Or I can just grab this arrow here and drag it out. And if I were to use that cut, it would create a basic straight cut there if I looked right at that face. I'd say normal to it. Notice it's a nice cutaway there. But we're not here to learn how to do a regular extruded cut. We want to do a revolved cut. So let me show you the difference. So let's delete this feature here. And to do a revolved cut, we need to have something to revolve around, so we need an axis. So come up here to reference geometry, come down here to access and my selection. I'm just going to choose the outside of this circle or that cylinder which will be then a circle. Click okay. And now we have an axis. So now I can take this shape over here and revolve it around that axis over there. So here's my sketch. Here's my axis. Let's go ahead and create a revolved cut. And the first question it's asking me is what is my axis? So I'm going to go ahead and choose that one right there. And notice what happens, as soon as I choose that, it takes that sketch and revolves it around 360 degrees to cut away that shape. Then notice down here under feature. A scope is all bodies or selected bodies and click on this one. Okay. And it's going to go ahead and cut that away. Now that looks very similar to what we saw before, but however if we click on this face here to look on normal two, you can see that actually it's not a straight cut. It's revolving around that part. So you have a nice smooth cut. Now we can add to our shape, if we wanted it to. Come back over here to the revolved cut. Under that revolved cut is a sketch, go back and edit that sketch. This time let's get add a basic triangle. So here's my triangle. I'm going to click over here and just drag it into the shape right here. All right. Make sure that's connected. It looks like it's not, there it is. Wait. Okay. Now we got a nice triangle. Now, when I exit out, I was expecting to get a cut that went around this green cylinder here, but I didn't. So let's go back to that feature itself and see what's going on. So edit the feature and notice down here the feature scope. That part is not included. So just click on all bodies, then click on okay. And now you've got a cut that's doing both parts. It's cutting through over here, as well as cutting that little triangle around the outside of this part here. So you can do a whole bunch of things with this tool. And you can choose which body, if you have a multi-body part like I do here is going to be affected by that tool. Now also going back over here to the cut, go back to the extruded cut feature. We don't have to go all the way around, right? We can also just go maybe in one direction or for a certain amount of degrees. So say type in like something like 30 degrees, you can see here, I'm just going to be cutting this direction here. I'm just going to be making a very small cut in the side over here. I can also go in direction two, so I can define how I want to cut in both directions. I can choose the feature scope as well. In fact, I can also choose selected contours, right? So if I want to use just one of these shapes, I can just select it. I just want to use this guy over here, right. Or if I want to use the other one, I can do that by just selecting in that box. And it's going to choose that sketch boundary, and it won't be using this one over here. But I want to use both of them. So let's go ahead and delete that out of that box. Click on okay. You can see there. I've just made that little revolved cut that affects this part here, as well as this guy over here. And again, you can do this. You can set up as many different axes as you'd like. You can have as much or as little in your original sketch as you'd like. And then just define how far you'd like to cut around in your shape. And that's what you need to know to use the revolved cut feature inside of SolidWorks.

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