Several year ago, SOLIDWORKS introduced the Wrap command – a nice little tool for wrapping a 2D sketch onto a planar or non-planar face. Since then, many improvements have been made to the tool, but even in 2016 we’re still unable to use the wrap command on a spherical or toroidal surface.
1 – Notification of Unsupported Face Type
The traditional workaround for this issue has been to leave the sketch on its plane and perform an extruded cut with an offset start condition and an offset from surface end condition. However, this often produces unwanted non-uniform geometric conditions, or in some cases, total feature failure. Swept cuts have also been used to circumvent this limitation, but with limitations of their own.
2 – Undesired Results Produced from Extruded Cut Command
So how do we resolve this? The key lies in the Thickened Cut command, a tool typically reserved for surfacing. By projecting our sketch onto the spherical surface using the Split Line tool, we can then select the sketch region and convert it into a surface by using the Offset Surface command and specifying an offset of zero.
3 – Split Line and Offset Surface Used to Produce Surface Body
With this surface now available, we can leverage the Thickened Cut command, resulting in a nice cut of uniform depth on our spherical surface. While an Extruded Cut could produce the same results for this model in particular, this technique can be extended to toroidal surfaces, or any other surface type not currently supported by the Wrap command.
4 – Thickened Cut Used to Produce Cut of Uniform Depth
It’s been revealed this year at SolidWorks World that enhanced functionality for the Wrap command is soon to come, supporting all types of surfaces – but until then, enjoy!