Struggling with loft on a more complex sketch

laurence_gough

Hello all, my first post here as I am little stuck on a bit of a time sensitive project. 

I have created some sketches and an offset plane but when I try to use the loft feature between these sketch faces it just does some odd lines which I cannot work out why. When I test a simple shape such as a rectangle even with cutouts it works fine. 

Here is the link to the document: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/b59a98ea8a943ef65ad48973/w/96a8a4d25ec282da4617fbeb/e/17d2f5245831986c469b2cfb?renderMode=0&uiState=6351ee7650626e6139a3befd

Any help would be massively appreciated. I suspect it's something to do with constraints but I cannot work it out.

NeilCooke

It's self-intersecting. You're going to struggle creating a loft between sketches with different numbers of entities - match connections will fix it, or splitting the entities of the simpler sketch so the number of entities is the same, but that will take some time.

EvanReese

I'd personally not try to do this with a single loft. As a rule (at lest starting out with, it's best to loft shapes that have the same number of corners, and you should know which ones should connect to which. You can force them into position with the "match connections" part of the feature. Rather than trying to loft two complex sketches together at once. I'd probably build it in stages:

1. break up the main sketches into smaller sections
2. use several lofts to get the major shapes (but ignore the rib shapes and other details)
3. add secondary shapes with more sketches and lofts

That said, I was able to get some result with yours using match connections. Here's a screen recording of my first pass at solving it so you can hopefully pick up on how to troubleshoot it. https://www.loom.com/share/ef0b564ed4a24a28a3b1f651db2e49f7

And here's the doc where it's working: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/30e6e1239af517defdad60f4/w/75e25a9b593a8f39d53aa24b/e/99e7ed4243b8e0ea4de3c261