Thousands of holes

I'm trying to punch thousands of 1/32" holes every 1/8" inch over a
non-planer surface to form a "peg-board like" surface. Is there a
technique in Solidworks to do this? Identifing and/or patterning out
each hole brings the software to its knees. Thanks in advance.

 

I have no idea of the physical specification of your system, but I once
tried to pattern only a couple hundred holes with my system (1GB RAM,
3.0 GHz CPU, NVIDIA Quadro 1300 FX), it was unusable. The only thing I
can think of that _may_ help is to enable the "Geometry Pattern" check
box in the pattern property manager.

I wouldn't put much hope in it though...you are asking a lot IMHO.

Dave

 

Personally, I would do one of the following, rather than make immense
patterns:

- create a sketch of the area which has holes in it and cross hatch it,
use a note to specify the holes and pattern
- split out the face or make a trimmed offset surface and put a color or
texture on the surface that looks like holes if possible.
- if you really "have to" have the holes, make configurations with and
without. You wont want to be the one that makes a 2d drawing of a part
with holes like that.
- there is a new function in SW06 which will fill an area with a
pattern. Pretty slick for irregularly shaped patterns.

 

If all you need is the appearance of holes, you might apply a texture to it.
Or, what about a sketch - it might not carry the overhead. I don't know -
never tried it.

WT

 

MG,

You might want to try creating a sketch containing the hole centerpoints.

This sketch could be used to pattern your holes. For a lightweight version
of your model, simply suppress the pattern, and show the sketch.

Hope this helps.

CG

 

If you have to make the holes for some reason you might want to run the
Patbench benchmark to show that there are limitations.

http://www.engtran.com/SWBM001.html

 

Here is my secret.

We make circular patterns of 10K holes or more on single parts. My
situation is a round part that I model one pie shape, which I try to
keep holes in this pie section to <1000. I then use an array of the
pie shaped BODY to create the rest of the round part. Then combine the
part into one piece. By doing this we are able to make a part with a
lot of holes and still be manageable.

Your situation is a linear pattern of a body and create a square of the
part with about 100 holes. This will take a moment to create the main
body with the pattern that will work for your linear pattern.

I have taken this theory farther. We have a pizza pie concept. Where
I model the first slice as a pepperoni and the second slice is a
mushroom and the next slice may be a combination. So for the pepperoni
I have one pattern on the pie shape, and on the mushroom I have a
different pattern and on the combination I have a third pattern. Now I
array the bodies accordingly and I get a round part with multiple
patterns. We have taken this to about 20K round features and still
have a manageable part in the assembly.

When you live in a world of chaos, it is amazing how creative you can
be, iQ.

 

This would be quite interesting to benchmark - Paul???

WT

 

I have been contemplating something like this. Since memory runs out
during the generattion of a pattern and not when the pattern is
finished it may be that some scratch memory is used and released. What
has been discussed here suggests that there is a way to greatly reduce
the amount of scratch memory used. If I can figure a way to do this
I'll roll it into a benchmark if only to show SW it is possible.

 

Well, what about just creating some parts with the different methods and
look at the rebuild statistics. It wouldn't be quite as automatic, but
would give a comparison of the methods.

WT

 

That is what I was contemplating.

First brute force, then pizza slice.

I could never find it but there was somebody who posted problems with
PC board layouts with thousands of vias. I did build a test for that.
Looks kind of cool when done.