Join Splines For Extrusion

brian_anderson272

I was trying to trace a shape with a splines and it was like it ran out of points. So I finished it with another spline and now I cannot get the two splines to join together
 so I can extrude the shape. I would appreciate some help, I am fairly new to this.

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/80a2ff886865474b8f4b25e9/w/7416c641c1fc0b1e93aec5a8/e/14750f03c8176f2ef0d5a099

martin_kopplow

Hi Brian,

first thing: You used way too many spline points. 10% of them - carefully placed - would have done the job, if not less. Then, you gout yourself in trouble by accidently catching loads of conditions between all these points, which have to be calculated each time you make a change, making the process super slow. Then, you tried to close the splines with short pieces of lines, and these do now overlap your spline's joint. That's not helpful with the extrusion.

A better approach would be to make multiple shorter and lower order splines that each start and end at a corner (of which you have many in this shape), where they are joined using exactly one coincident condition. See how few points you need, and how much smoother the shape gets, the less points there are:

It might help to fix the first spline point of the sketch. Start with as few spline points as possible, you can always add one later, if you really need it (Dropdown Menu under spline tool). You might even consider Bezier for this task.

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/02a3e1252fed054d49b80dd1/w/be9ec5bae07069d55e8bde78/e/86c1c7765ecbbd3ff0b5e9e1?renderMode=0&uiState=65e448e5c0c06771d974ed6e

martin_kopplow

Hi Brian,

first thing: You used way too many spline points. 10% of them - carefully placed - would have done the job, if not less. Then, you gout yourself in trouble by accidently catching loads of conditions between all these points, which have to be calculated each time you make a change, making the process super slow. Then, you tried to close the splines with short pieces of lines, and these do now overlap your spline's joint. That's not helpful with the extrusion.

A better approach would be to make multiple shorter and lower order splines that each start and end at a corner (of which you have many in this shape), where they are joined using exactly one coincident condition. See how few points you need, and how much smoother the shape gets, the less points there are:

It might help to fix the first spline point of the sketch. Start with as few spline points as possible, you can always add one later, if you really need it (Dropdown Menu under spline tool). You might even consider Bezier for this task.

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/02a3e1252fed054d49b80dd1/w/be9ec5bae07069d55e8bde78/e/86c1c7765ecbbd3ff0b5e9e1?renderMode=0&uiState=65e448e5c0c06771d974ed6e

brian_anderson272

Thanks for the advice, I appreciate the help