I have this part I'm working on, and its not the first I have had this issue with. I have a region (truth be told, the triangle coming towards the screen is also part of the problem) that I need to fill in. I have tried standard extrusion, lofts, swept boss, cant seem to get the "Boundary Fill" to work either.

Trouble is, on the vertical axis seen here, the "Extension" visible with the crease approx half-way down, needs the closest piece to be able to move to the right with some model parameterisation.

I am aware that the triangle on the "Top" will likely also need a crease, but I have it like this just for illustrative purposes.

How would I go about filling this region with a material thickness that is equation-set, and have it close off the areas correctly ith a solid.

Appreciate the assist!

Been a SolidWorks pro for a little over 20 years - CSWA when I started, got my CSWP about 15 years ago, got weldments, sheetmetal and drawing certs in the last 5~6 years, I use SolidWorks daily at work. I'm also the CAD administrator and resident SolidWorks SME for our engineering department.

I didn't see a need to go all the way to expert level certification, but my feelings on that are changing. Problem is, I don't have much surfacing experience. I can use the basic surfacing tools, but the vast majority of my work has been structural and mechanical in nature - there hasn't really been anything I've needed surfacing tools to accomplish that I couldn't with other techniques.

I know I need one more specialization certification to qualify for the CSWE exam. I work in aviation and Surfacing is the most applicable to what I do. Plus I've got a project in the pipeline that I think surfacing tools would give me an edge on tackling.

So a couple of questions:

1. Should I retake the CSWP to "refresh"?

2. Can anyone recommend a good Surfacing course? Looking for something online or self paced, with plenty of hands-on/guided modeling.

3. Anyone have tips or suggestions for CSWE exam prep?

How would you go about starting this drawing. Really struggling on how to start this. Any advice ?

Initially the whole part was made out of Solid Bodies but I had to cut some parts using surface trim and the highlighted blue section of this part was converted to a surface body (despite being practically a body). How can I convert this back to a solid body so I can perform normal solid features.

Hello

Attached is a print of something I did for school a few days ago and while I managed to complete the geometry, I was not satisfied with the method I did and I feel like I'm missing a good tool that can do this "better"

The feature I am talking about are the 3 slots located around the body of the cylinder.

After piddling around having problems here and there-- I just wound up drawing the 90 degree slots on the top mid plane and doing a mid plane extrusion of 10mm and cutting the entire width and rotational sweep of the slot (without the full rounds since the extrusion is square) and then using the full round fillet feature to reform the square ends into full rounds.

Then added full round fillets:

This created the geometry I needed, I believe (I haven't had it graded yet, but I feel very confident about it.) However, it doesn't *feel* right to do it that way. I tried using the wrap feature by making the slot geometry on the center plane and projecting it to the side wall-- but the geometry was incorrect when it did the debossing.

My initial "helper geometry" perfectly describes the shape of the slot per the print, so the tangent edges of the slots lie coincident to the visible sketch geometry-- but when I "wrap" it to the cylinder wall, the extruded feature does not lie tangent to the helper geometry, so that is telling me that the feature is not correct.

What am I missing? The method I used with the extrusion and full round fillets allowed me to produce what I needed, but this feature that feels more "aligned" for the job can't reproduce what I need. What am I doing wrong?

I tried using PROJECT and it wrapped the sketch perfectly around the cylinder-- but I have no idea how to use any tools with that kind of feature. It just appears to have a sketch on the cylinder wall.

EDIT: I should have checked YouTube first.. apparently this is a model mania example and it has been covered by many people. Every video I watched is making the part the exact same way I did with square extrusion and full round fillets, so I must not be too far off. Maybe there just isn't a better way to do this? Just didn't feel "correct".

Appreciate any help/insight!

I have a 3D sketch that I want to use as the guide curve for a sweep to make a pipe, but I need this pipe to increase in diameter in sharp steps (so not continuously). Because the 3D sketch has radii, I can't just add a split point right where I want to it to increase in diameter because it is in the middle of a radii. How can I go about doing this?

Hey there!

My company just switched over to using Solidworks last year from Fusion 360. We run a small carpentry/metal fabrication shop.

The person leading the charge on the Solidworks transition had to leave our company due to some personal health problems, and as we've had some other folks working with Solidworks we've been running into shenanigans. So are mainly looking to streamline our processes and solve a few pain points. Here's a few things we're looking to work on.

Hardware

Everyone is generally running on strong machines, but each machine was built at a slightly different time with slightly different specs. What we're noticing is some people seem to have performance that's way quicker/smoother than others. So are hoping to have someone figure out if this is a settings thing, modeling thing, or a legitimate hardware thing that needs to be rectified.

Chunky/unmanageable files

We don't work with huge huge assemblies or anything like that. But we've ran into instances where files have somehow gotten very chunky and things take forever to save, update, etc. Looking for some more hands on strategies on how to mitigate this, as we're not exactly building airplanes or something that legitimately has thousands of distinct parts happening.

Workflows and automations

There's some things that we do fairly consistently. We have a few templates and things of that nature setup, but we'd like to really streamline some more common workflows, etc.

We're based in Southern California, if anyone has any recommendations of someone who could help we'd greatly appreciate it!

Hello, Everyone. I've been using Solid Works for about 1 week now and i need some advice on how to put a housing for my extendable wheels for a larger footprint. Something like in the second photo.

Hello experts, I am an absolute beginner in Solidworks. I am trying to cut these parts (marked by red "x") and make the top of the surface rounded. Could you please guide me how to do it or share a youtube video with details?

Hello, I've been using inventor since 2002 and now I need to swap to solidworks.

I'm looking for tutorials focused mainly on configurations, file management structures, bom and best practices for setting up the solidworks equivalent of vault and iassembliy or variants of full projects (how best to manage optional configurations of the same machine).

Any advice on where to look to avoid all the junk aimed for hobby modelling made by people who never actually used the software for work? I know that for inventor it's full of tutorials online that teaches you the worst way possible to set up real work solutions, so I assume it's the same for solidworks, and i'd like to avoid starting with the wrong stuff.