Best way to create angled holes for splayed legs

Skippy

Im trying to add angled holes to the base of a rectangular project that will hold 8mm rod as legs. There will be 4 legs, one at each corner and each angled out to the corners at about 20 degrees. I found a picture of a coffee table with roughly what I mean.

The only way I've found to do this is to use move face on a cylinder twice in two axis to angle it and then use that to boolean out the holes (I can also copy the cylinder to use as the leg itself). 

Im wondering if theres a better way to go about this? Im extremely new to CAD so if this is a very easy question I apologise.

dustin_hecocks

Hi @nick_grant . The creation on planes in OS has a ways to go. As such, the part you are trying to create can become a little tricky. I have attached a quick mock up of a table, angled legs, and angled holes in the table top to the legs. I apologize for how sloppy it is; I just drew it quick without dimensioning a thing.

For things like this I have always used planes. However, I found creating planes for this task to be somewhat difficult. To the point where I created the holes by drawing the circles on the face of the table, and swept the cut using the table leg sketch as the sweep path. It works, not easily and clearly, but it works. And from there I'd mirror til its done. Does that help at all?

Angled legs

jakeramsley

Depending on the shapes of the entering/exiting cross-sections, I would consider drawing those on the top and bottom faces of the table then lofting between them with a remove.

dustin_hecocks

Hi @nick_grant . The creation on planes in OS has a ways to go. As such, the part you are trying to create can become a little tricky. I have attached a quick mock up of a table, angled legs, and angled holes in the table top to the legs. I apologize for how sloppy it is; I just drew it quick without dimensioning a thing.

For things like this I have always used planes. However, I found creating planes for this task to be somewhat difficult. To the point where I created the holes by drawing the circles on the face of the table, and swept the cut using the table leg sketch as the sweep path. It works, not easily and clearly, but it works. And from there I'd mirror til its done. Does that help at all?

Angled legs

Skippy

That does help. Its a more elegant way than using move face multiple times. Thank you

nav

Hi @nick_grant here another workaround using planes only for the angled holes in the video link : http://recordit.co/9PEEMQQarF

andrew_troup

What you might consider doing instead is to extrude a rectangle as surfaces, and then add draft to opposite faces at one value, and to the remaining two faces at another value. 
refer the model 
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/8d23d2ae65a64bbfa40412b0/w/ed655ae059e44defab444e0a/e/d7ce793467ff44b097165fdf

You will need to un-hide the surface to see how this was done.

I used sweep to model the legs along the inclined edges of the resulting surface body.
For the cylindrical rod legs, I made a plane for the sketch, using the "Curve-Point" specifiers.
The rationale for using sweep, instead of extrude, was simply that (at present) there is no "extrude up to vertex" end condition, so a sweep is the best way to simply capture the desired intent.

In the other, (which I did simply to show why the extra plane was necessary) the sketch was on the "Top" plane, resulting in an elliptical leg

Skippy

Thanks, 2 more excellent ways of doing it. The Onshape community really is fantastic, its a big help for newbies such as myself.

jakeramsley

Depending on the shapes of the entering/exiting cross-sections, I would consider drawing those on the top and bottom faces of the table then lofting between them with a remove.

Skippy

jakeramsley said:

Depending on the shapes of the entering/exiting cross-sections, I would consider drawing those on the top and bottom faces of the table then lofting between them with a remove.

I did try that first but found it creates a slight hourglass shape between the two circles but I assume adding a guide would stop that behaviour. If im creating a plane to draw the guide I can choose between sweep or loft.

Thanks