SolidWorks® Surfacing and Complex Shape Modeling Bible

Chapter 20. Modeling Overmolded Geometry

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding the overmold process

• Modeling the toothbrush

Overmolded geometry can be handled in several ways, from the extremely detail–oriented tooling engineer to the somewhat less stringent artistic types. Artistic types may tend to fake in something that looks like an overmold, but engineers and mold designers have to actually model the internal geometry, the interface between the differing materials. In this chapter, I will show a range of approaches, starting with the more stringent engineering approach and following with a couple of quick "looks like" modeling ideas for those who need less structured data.

I have seen several methods for modeling overmolded parts, and the first method that I will show is the most accurate and the fastest that I have seen. This method assumes that the overmolded material is a volume. Other methods assume the overmolded material is a layer, and for those methods, surfacing is a better approach than the solid approach shown in this part. At the end of the chapter, I show other surfacing approaches in which the overmold adds thickness to the outside of the part, rather than remaining flush with the surface of the part, as in the main example.

Because this toothbrush is a nice part to model, and the overmold part of the data is relatively simple, this chapter also goes through the rest of the modeling process on the toothbrush, rather than just covering what turns out to be rather simple overmold ...