From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Design for Mechatronics

Using Shell - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Design for Mechatronics

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Using Shell

- [Instructor] Now we'll take a quick look at using the Shell command and the Thickness Analysis command. The Shell command is used to create a part of uniform wall thickness, which is very useful in plastics parts, as well as metal castings, to help avoid warp and distortion. Let me just go to my Features tab and find my Shell command here. And within my Shell command, I can define the wall thickness. So let's say about three millimeters in this case. And I can also remove any faces I may want. So maybe I want to remove this top face here and shell out this object of the link two of my robotic arm. So I can put 'em in the internals of my robotic arm, the gears or belt drives, electronics, whatever I may need. What's also useful here, I can turn on Show preview, and that should just give me an idea of what my shell data object will look like once complete. And if I'm happy with that, I can hit the green check. And now I can see my shelled out object here. Notice once the object is shelled, I should see that I should have that uniform wall thickness of three millimeters in this case throughout my entire part. But to help evaluate or double-check that, I can navigate over to my Evaluate tab, and I have a command called Thickness Analysis here. And here, I can just run a quick calculation of my part to help show me potentially thin or thick regions of my design. So I can just put in whatever parameters I'd like here. In this case, maybe I'll throw in the three millimeters. That's my wall thickness that I'm hoping for. And then I can say maybe Show thin regions or Show thick regions, and I can just click Calculate. And once it has finished calculating here, it'll show me a nice visual of any potentially thin or thick regions I may have in my design. And gives a nice color-coding here as well, so I can double-check the color-coding. And notice that all the gray areas should be my target thickness, which is that three millimeters, and might have some other colors there either indicating thicker or thinner areas. Now notice in this case, it looks like my thin and thick regions are all very close to that three millimeters that I was hoping for. So everything looks good to me in this case. But as you can see, this could be a very useful tool to very quickly find any potential thick or thin regions in your designs that might again cause issues in manufacturing and may require some redesign to try to avoid any major thin or thick regions.

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