Need help with hollowing out a surface [Inventor]

[ajohnson1993]

Hey everyone, I am working on a project and have ran into a problem. I need to hollow out a currently solid surface in order for it to have a uniform thickness of 3mm that follows the curvature of opposite side. These pictures will help show what I mean.

Top Side:

Bottom Side:

Basically, I need to hollow out the backside to make it fit the surface of the front side with a thickness of 3mm. Is there some sort of tool that is designed for this or another way of doing it? 

Any help or guidance would be appreciated, thank you ahead of time! 

[JDMather · Accepted solution]

Shell

Attach your ipt file here.

BTW - "solid surface" is a contradition in terms (in Inventor).

Solids have faces and volume.

Surfaces have zero thickness and no volume.

Are you trying to make to mating solids?

Thicken/Offset as Surface(s).

and then Thicken Quilt as New Solid.

More information is needed.

Attach your ipt file here.

 Feature history is very important when using Shell.

I suspect you want the shell to occur earlier in history than in your image.

Drag the EOP up to enter the Shell feature earlier in history.

[ajohnson1993]

Thanks for the reply and sorry for the confusion, I need a solid that is 3mm thick and the same shape as the top surface.  I have to go to work right now so I dont have the time to try the shell feature but I will definitely try that when I get back. 

Here is my Ipt file!

[JDMather]

Most of your sketches are not constrained.

You might read this http://home.pct.edu/~jmather/SkillsUSA%20University.pdf

[ajohnson1993]

I'm new to inventor so at the time I did not know why constraints were needed, will shell work without them?

Ok so I tried using shell on the back flat face which gave me errors (for some reason the arrow is pointing in the wrong direction, it only goes along the z axis, not sure why.) When I try and shell the top curved face the arrow points the right direction but it gives me an error stating the vertexs are having a problem.  I need the thickness of the entire top to be 1mm, but I have an edge around it that is .5mm, I dont know  if that is causing a problem or not.

I am sorry for my lack of knowledge about this tool lol, this is the last thing needed to be done and it has turned out to be very troublesome. Any more tips on how I can get it working?

EDIT: It seems to work with .5mm but not 1mm, attached photo to show what happened.

[JDMather · Accepted solution]

Shell works on the entire solid body.
It is not clear to me what you want.

As I stated earlier - I suspect you wanted shell earlier in the feature history tree.

[ajohnson1993]

Yes that is correct, is there a way to use it on just parts earlier in the tree?

UPDATE: I did it, it worked! I supressed a bunch of features to get to the part i needed then performed the shell. Thank you for all of your help, it is greatly appreciated. Have a nice day!

[JDMather]

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@ajohnson1993 wrote:

Yes that is correct, is there a way to use it on just parts earlier in the tree?

UPDATE: I did it, it worked! I supressed a bunch of features to get to the part i needed then performed the shell. Thank you for all of your help, it is greatly appreciated. Have a nice day!

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The easy way is to drag the red End of Part marker up the feature tree, do your shell and then drag it back down.