surface thickening issues

[marcusfriesl]

I have a surface model, made of patches in rhino.  This will be part of an assembly.  I need to thicken the surface to 12mm for the material thickness.

I imported the surface model from rhino, and stitched the surface together, before running the Thicken/offset command.  I get an error "The attempted operation had problems splitting faces and connecting intersection edges into loops. Try with different inputs."

I deleted the stitch, and tried to thicken each patch individually.  The attached part model is how I made out.  A few surfaces still generate the same error message.

One attempt to fix this was in the holes in the surface I deleted the face edges of the thickness, and then patched the outer and inner surface seperately, and then stitching that together as a new solid.  This also only works in certain areas.

Is there an easier way to do this or a solution for achieving this surface thickness.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Inventor 2014

[marcusfriesl]

Also,  the order in which I pick the patches affects which surface will cause the error message.

[JDMather]

Here you go.

[marcusfriesl]

How did you accomplish that?  I would just like to know what I was doing wrong.  Thanks.

[yannick3 · Accepted solution]

Hi

1- copy your composite surface to multiple surfaces( feature, copy object or Composite1 RMB, copy object)

2- stitch all surfaces  in one (feature, stitch)

3-thicken the stitched surface and check the quilt option

and that's it

[marcusfriesl]

Thank you both for the quick response.

I used that method on a different surface as well, and ran into a few issues but modifying the maximum tolerance value in the stitch feature seems to alleviate it.

When I get some more time I would like to build this surface fully in inventor.

Thank you.