Fairly new to Onshape and have run into a problem

edward_bowen

Hi, my name is Austin and I've been using Onshape for a few days now. I didn't really bother with tutorials, (ooops, my bad!) opting instead to figure everything out as I go.

With all that said, I've been getting along just fine until now. I have a model consisting of a head flange that has an extrusion of the ports of one inch with maybe a 1.2 degree draft to open the ports up, then a sweep along a bridging curve to an extruded sketch for the plenum. At some point I did a boolean union operation or two to clean up extra material and add the runners to the plenum, then a shell operation to make the actual part as it will be constructed (3D print or whatever). Now the plenum and runners are a surface and I'm trying to convert it back to a part so I can join it to the head flange. I'll leave a link here so maybe someone here can tell me what I'm doing wrong. Would very much appreciate any help y'all can give me! 

Here's the part in question: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/7bf4631aef0f0fa513509080/w/8f9cd3a06d8d2cd0975686ae/e/8d0eab0ef0cc1ec2c5016c6a?renderMode=0&uiState=63861b9944b96147dc606554

eric_pesty

I would get rid of the "delete face1" feature (that's what is turning the part into a surface) and instead select the end faces of the runners on the shell feature (instead of using "hollow") as this will open them.
As a side note I'm not sure why you have three separate boolean features when you should be able to do all of it at once. Also, in many cases you can just use the "add" option instead of "new" when creating a feature to avoid creating new parts (unless you specifically need it to be a separate body, which doesn't seem to be the case here), the sweeps could have been joined in one step.

You are doing pretty well for skipping the tutorials, however you are wasting some time by not taking advantage of some the features.

eric_pesty

I would get rid of the "delete face1" feature (that's what is turning the part into a surface) and instead select the end faces of the runners on the shell feature (instead of using "hollow") as this will open them.
As a side note I'm not sure why you have three separate boolean features when you should be able to do all of it at once. Also, in many cases you can just use the "add" option instead of "new" when creating a feature to avoid creating new parts (unless you specifically need it to be a separate body, which doesn't seem to be the case here), the sweeps could have been joined in one step.

You are doing pretty well for skipping the tutorials, however you are wasting some time by not taking advantage of some the features.

steve_shubin

@edward_bowen

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/ef609d5096c8972fc9d57581/w/2e3922ab7aa3129677cad9f8/e/cf656fa2b157fff5971ab749

steve_shubin

@edward_bowen

Eliminated the REPLACE FACE
Realized the THICKEN extended the header into the plenum

edward_bowen

Oh ok, I thought that delete face operation was messing me up somehow, but wasn't sure how to proceed without breaking a bunch of stuff. I think a lot of the stuff I did was just past midnight when I should have been in bed lol

edward_bowen

steve_shubin said:

@edward_bowen

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/ef609d5096c8972fc9d57581/w/2e3922ab7aa3129677cad9f8/e/cf656fa2b157fff5971ab749

Oh hell, I wasn't going to have anyone do it for me lol. I figured it out, but seeing your way of doing it tripped a bunch of lightbulbs off in my head! 

steve_shubin

edward_bowen said:

… it tripped a bunch of lightbulbs off in my head! 

Happy to hear you’ve started looking through the document.

I’ve learned a lot by studying other peoples work

Seeing some of the documents that some post in the forum — well those docs are a classroom in themselves