From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2017 Essential Training

Trimming and extending portions of a sketch - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2017 Essential Training

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Trimming and extending portions of a sketch

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- The Trim and Extend tools are some of the most useful tools in the Sketch toolbar. It allows me to create a bunch of geometry and then quickly just remove a bunch the corners and edges or extend them out to the other entities inside of that sketch. To get started, let's go ahead and click on "Trim Entities". You can see we have a bunch of different options of how we can trim. So starting at the very bottom here is "Trim to Closest," which is pretty self explanatory. If I click on a line itself, notice it highlights it kind of in a reddish or purplish color and it just will allow me to trim that away to the closest other line or intersection you see. Same thing over here. Same thing over here. If I undo those, bring them back, I can go back to Trim again and this time I'm going to "Trim away Outside". This one's looking for two lines or cut lines and I'm going to choose this line right here and this line right here. And what this is going to do, it's going to trim away any segment of that line that's not between these two boundaries. So click on this one here, it's going to trim away both sides. Same thing here and same thing there. All right. I'm going to undo that a couple of times as well so we bring them back. Let's go back to "Trim" one more time. This time I'm going to "Trim away Inside". So same thing. Set up the boundaries. This one and that one and then I want to keep the outside and remove the inside. That's going to be "Trim away Inside". Undo that again. This time I'm going to go back to "Trim" and "Trim a Corner", so it's going to be choosing two entities. So I'm going to choose this one here and that one there and it's going to trim away that corner. That corner here, that corner there. Remove the outside. And let's Undo that again, and now for my favorite one, "Power Trim". Power Trim basically means just draw a line through the lines you want to get rid of. It's going to create a little gray line showing where I'm trimming. So anywhere this little gray line cuts through, it's going to trim it away, so watch this. As soon as I trim through this line, it just automatically cuts it away. Over here, cut through there. Over here, cut through there. Through there. Through there. Through there, and you can just keep holding down the left mouse button and then pretty much just cut through anything that you want to. When you let go it hides that little gray line and you've trimmed away whatever you needed to trim. It stays active. If you want to trim this, trim that, trim that, trim that, or trim that, it's very easy to use. Like I said, Power Trim is pretty much the only trim tool I really ever use because it's so powerful and quick to just remove any extra line segments in your design. When you're happy with that, click "Okay". Now let's go under the Trim Tool and you see the little drop down here below it and go down to "Extend Entities" and that one works a little differently. It basically takes whatever the line is and it'll extend it up to the next feature or line that it sees. So in this case here it won't work because there's nothing above it and there's nothing below it. But this line over here, if you highlight over it, it'll show you that it's going to extend that line up to this circle. Same thing if you click on that circle. It's going to extend that circle all the way up to this next one here. So click on that and it just extends the line. This one here, it just extends the line up to here. This one over here, it's going to extend it over to that circle. Up here, you're not really going to get anything because these don't have anything to bound them by, but if I were to create another sketch, maybe another line over here, then I went back to "Extend Entities", then I can extend it over to that line here. I can extend it over that line over there and that's just fine. So both of those tools, both Trim and Extend, are very, very useful and allow you to create nice sketches very quickly. You can always extend lines a little further than they need to be and then just come back with a trim tool and just clean everything up in one shot. Both the Trim and Extend tools are both some of the most commonly used tools in the sketch modifiers.

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