shell vs thicken

gz

So can someone explain to me why shell works just fine most of the time, but thicken has a lot, lot, lot of issues?

Many times it's easier for me to draw the specs of something I want to enclose and then thicken around it instead of having to add the wall thickness to every.single.dimension in order to account for the shell command.

NeilCooke

gz said:

Many times it's easier for me to draw the specs of something I want to enclose and then thicken around it instead of having to add the wall thickness to every.single.dimension in order to account for the shell command.

No idea what you mean here? Can you link an example? Perhaps flipping the shell might work for you. 

Shell already has surrounding geometry to help it trim the offset faces nicely. Thicken just offsets all faces regardless. Again, no way tell what the problems are without an example 

romeograham

One of the particular areas that causes issues with Thicken commands (in Onshape, SolidWorks, Creo - must be others too) is "what to do with the edges".

In a surface model (or any model, for that matter) it's easy to have great geometry where the surface curvature around the "open" perimeter of the part is not continuous.  Since Thicken creates a surface body whose edge is perpendicular to the surface at every point, this means that the edges end up with complex geometry - often that can't get sorted out by Onshape.

However, when you use Shell on an  enclosed body, you're giving a surface to use as the new edge, and eliminating most of that complex geometry.

Often, this preserves design intent better, too.

When creating an enclosure for electronics components or other things, you may find that using offset surfaces from your reference geometry (one feature) then dimensioning from that reference surface (for example) may reduce the amount of extra thinking you have to do in all your sketches.

If I have time, I'll add some images or an example OS doc later.

Happy Mother's Day to everyone!