topic Re: Can you sweep a body along a path in Fusion Design, Validate & Document Forum

Can you sweep a body along a path

jackwcallen — Wed, 24 Aug 2016 14:40:14 GMT

Hello,

I am trying to use sweep to cut a body from another body.

1. Is this possible?

2. Is this the correct way to model this?

Hopefully this screenshot helps show my aim.

It is suppose to show the path of a ball nose cutter around a cylinder. Slightly off center to the cylinder axis.

I tried to sweep cut a sketch profile, and then revolve cut what was left. But this gave an undesired join between those two operations.

Many thanks for any help.

Jack

Re: Can you sweep a body along a path

James.Youmatz — Wed, 24 Aug 2016 15:04:12 GMT

Hi @jackwcallen,

So this should be fairly simple to do! Assuming you already have off center path sketched out (which it looks like you do), you can just project the ball nose cutter into a sketch plane and then use that sketch profile to do a sweep cut along your path. I know you said you tried something similar to this, so my fault if you have already tried this! It seems to work okay for me however. I created a screencast below which demonstrates this workflow. Check it out and let me know what you think! Also, my offset path wasn't very good when I was recording so I just showed you the default path around the cylinder for demonstration purposes.

Re: Can you sweep a body along a path

jackwcallen — Wed, 24 Aug 2016 21:37:11 GMT

Hi James,

Many thanks for your quick response and video,

Yes, I had unfortunately tried that. Doing it that way leaves an undesired sharp edge between the two operations, sweep and revolve.

However after watching your video I believe I know where I need help with now.

When you create plane at angle, the angle is at 90 degrees. This is what I did.

What I have realised is that I require the plane to be perpendicular to my sweep line.

I suppose I could drag the angle round until it looked perpendicular. However that isn't very accurate.

Is there a way to create a plane perpendicular to a sketched curve.

If I could use the tangent plane option and then rotate that 90 degrees, that might be a work around. However that is only for cylindrical faces and doesn't work for sketched curves.

Many thanks

Jack

Re: Can you sweep a body along a path

TrippyLighting — Thu, 25 Aug 2016 00:20:54 GMT

You can create a construction plane along a path select your sweep path and pull the plane all the way to the beginning of the sweep path.

That plane can then be use to create the revolve profile and then that profile can also be swept along that path. That should create the perfect geometry you're looking for.

Re: Can you sweep a body along a path

jackwcallen — Thu, 25 Aug 2016 07:55:49 GMT

Perfect!!, Thanks a lot. It seems obvious now.