How to design the clearance(gap) between mating surface

Hi all,
I know this is a basic and stupid question, but i really need your
help.
I am designing plastic parts using SW2003.I often design the mating
parts together with the same size dimension.It is easy to design and
modify,but that does not work actually.I need add gap between the two
mating surface.How to add,0.2mm,0.5mm or 1mm for 2 to 100mm dimension
and when to add, during designing parts, or during making mould parts?
I know the value of the gap depending on the base size and material
and other, can you give me a general idea?
Thanks.

Tom ZENG

 

It's a little difficult determining whether your questions are really
SolidWorks questions or are actually injection molding design
questions. Are you new to SolidWorks, or new to mold design, or both?
I think you'll get more useful answers if you'll re-state the questions.

'Sporky'

 

there are a lot of ways you could do this

- you could do it while designing in context
- while wondering what to do next
- while sitting on a text

.... uh, sorry. it's that damned dr. seuss virus I picked up.


anyway, you can do it feature by feature in context between parts (extrude
offset from surface), or maybe once the parts are built do an offset
surface from one part to the other and cut with surface, you might even be
able to do it in a single part if the mating parts were designed multibody,
using a split feature, or, you might wait until some future release of the
software where ... uh, can't say.

There are lots of ways to get there, but so far none of them is what you'd
call just a magic button push. You might be tempted to use the cavity
function or some boolean operation, but that won't work since neither has
the ability to do a constant distance offset (only percent scale), the only
way I can think of to do something like this is by using the offset or
thicken functions with surfaces.

good luck, let us know what you wind up doing


matt


(tomzeng) wrote in

 

Thank you.I am a new Solidworks, product and mould designer.

Tom

 

Tom,

We've done it several different ways. All have their advantages and
disadvantages. Building a base part and then splitting it in two is nice
because you know everything matches up and you don't duplicate much work. It
has the disadvantage that you can't pull dimensions from the base part for
your drawings. Splitting can also be kind of tricky at times. As far as
making the gaps, sometimes you can just punch it out of the parts during the
split (leaving a little remnant in the base part), sometimes it's easier to
split the parts and then cut an offset in one (or possibly both) of them.

Lately we've been using master sketch parts for the outline at the split
line, screw locations, and other common features. Then we build both parts
from the master sketches. Again, the dimensions from the master sketches
don't pull into the drawings, but the other dimensions are still there. One
advantage here is that we can split the parts between engineers very early,
rather than waiting till one guy gets the base part done.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

That sound good.
Thank you.
Tom Zeng