newbie question

hi there
was wondering if anyone could give me some advice.

I built a model of an internet kiosk, first time with SolidWorks.
turned out pretty good but i think i may av gone about it the wrong
way.

The problem is, i want to remove certain aspects, but i cant do it cos
of the "tree" or parent/child system solidworks uses. Like i want to
remove a section but all the other sections i made after that get
deleted at the same time. Really annoying, my model is a complete mess
of rebuild errors :/

I try to start again by copying and pasting elements into a new sketch
but it doesnt work too well.

is there any way to fix this, if not, how can i avoid these problems
in future models.


Thanks a lot for any advice

 

At times it is possible. The problem you are experiencing is as you said
the parent child relation ship. A lot of times the relationship is no more
than a face being used by a sketch. This can compound quickly. If this is
the case you may be able to create a plane that wouldn't reference the
feature you want supressed and Edit Sketch plane.

There are many other things that could be referenced by sketches. Edges of
the feature for example. These relationships are a little harder to locate.
But to avoid this you will have to do planning before you start throwing
your model together. You need to think of how you (and in many cases your
boss) would want the model to be changed and try to model it and leave
yourself an out in cases that you may need to make a change. It is
impossible to always plan for the exact change that might need to be made,
but do your best. This comes with experience and training. One thing you
mignt want to try is to reference sketches instead of surfaces and edges
where you can. This way you can insert a chamfer above the child feature
with out breaking it because the edge is now gone, and you could suppress
the feature and leave the sketch unsupressed so the children of the sketch
are still intact.

Corey

 

you've experienced maybe the primary "learning curve" issue
of parametric modelers.
for the most part, grinding through such situations is
the best way to truly understand strategy with the software.
bill