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 In this tech tip, learn how to modify a library feature when the original geometry is not available.

Real case: John used for the past 6 months in production a sheetmetal part received from one of his customers (shown in fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Yesterday, he received a phone call from the same customer, requesting a prototype of the same part, but with the emboss depth reduced from 2.5 mm to 1.5 mm (fig. 2).

Fig. 2

John does not have the original library feature that generated the emboss tool feature. Therefore he tried to double click on the feature in the tree and edit the depth directly (see fig. 3).

Fig. 3

Unfortunately, the result was the error shown in fig. 4:

Fig. 4

Out of ideas, John called Javelin Support for help and Javelin provided the following workaround:

Move the rollback bar before the Emboss Tool Feature (fig. 5):

Fig. 5

Create a reference plane, by offsetting the bottom face down 1 mm (fig. 6):

Fig. 6

Move the rollback bar below the Emboss Tool Feature.
Edit the Sketch Plane of the Emboss Tool Feature Sketch (fig. 7.):

Fig. 7

Replace the bottom face reference with the new plane just created (fig. 8):

Fig. 8

Rebuild the part. From the top everything seems to be in order as per the new design intent (fig. 9):

Fig. 9

Looking from the bottom, we noticed that the emboss protrudes through the bottom face, which was expected, considering that the sketch plane is located 1mm bellow that face (fig. 10):

Fig. 10

This can be easily solved by trimming excess material from under the bottom face (fig. 11) using an extrude cut:

Fig. 11

The end result was good enough for John in order to manufacture the requested prototype overnight (fig. 12):

Fig. 12

Click here to download the SLDPRT file.

Alin Vargatu, CSWP, CSWP Sheet-Metal
Javelin Technologies

This post was submitted by Alin Vargatu.

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