CHAPTER 24
Using Plastic Features
IN THIS CHAPTER
Exploring plastic features
Learning about plastic evaluation tools
SolidWorks has several tools that are specific to modeling and evaluating plastic parts. These tools can help simplify and standardize some of the complex repetitive tasks involved with plastic part design. SolidWorks offers tools tailored to the needs of plastic part designers.
You can manually do all the work that these tools automate, which is useful when the automated tools do not provide the necessary options or flexibility. The more complex your models, the more comfortable you need to be with workaround techniques.
Because of the specific needs of plastic part modelers in some cases to prepare plastic parts for various molding methods, SolidWorks has a set of powerful evaluation tools that help you examine your models to check the amount of draft, thickness, and location of undercuts. Finding design-related manufacturability problems in manufacturing is expensive. Finding them in the design office is far less expensive and conserves time. A good grasp of the evaluation tools is an important component of good plastic part and mold modeling practice.
This chapter is written for the user who is already experienced in plastics practice and terminology, but needs to understand the SolidWorks tools used with the plastic and mold features. In this chapter, I assume that the reader already has a grasp of basic plastics and mold design.
Using Plastic Features
The ...
Get SolidWorks® 2011 Parts Bible now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
