Another thicken question

[jibberjack]

Back to my star...

So I'm trying to make this star dish thing and got the basic shell swept out but it does't want to thicken. It doesn't seem that complicated a shape. The pictures below show the line I swept as the profile, the result, and a close up of one of the points.

The initial sketch shape was created, with Trippy Peter's excellent help, by mirroring and circular patterning one spline that represents one half of one of the star points (if that makes sense) All the points should be identical. I then scaled that star shape out 6mm or so and raised it above the smaller one by 5mm. Then I drew the profile spline on the XZ plane. I swept that profile with the smaller star as the path and the bigger star as the guide rail. I was only able to do this in the Patch workspace BTW.

In the last image you can see a slight curl-back of the surface in the top view on just one side of each point. Is that what is not letting me thicken this shape? A bigger question might be why is that happening? The curves should be identical to each other. The other thing is that it seems different on each star point. Zooming in to other points show different levels of curl or none at all. It seems like an inconsistent sweep.

John

[Anonymous]

You're right, it's not that complicated of a shape, but I've had Fusion 360 choke on less using the Thicken command. The benefit of your design is it's symmetric, so you may want to try making a surface with just one arm of the star, thicken that and then use the circular pattern command to make the other four arms and combine them to get your star.

[TrippyLighting]

The more pressing questions are :

1.Why are you doing this with the timeline turned off ? Its not thatches cannot be one, but for a noob it's not recommended precisely because of the question you've posted. Without the timeline it's more difficult to understand what process you followed creating this design.

2. Why would it take you 20+ sketches to design this simple shape ?

I do agree that thicken should be able to do it's job on this shape.

[jibberjack]

The answer to question 1 is that this came from another file where I was experimenting with Direct Modeling. Is there a way to turn the timeline on again once it's been turned off?

The answer to question 2 is that yes, I'm a noob, and it's easy to make things messy when the sketch process isn't always clear. I spent a lot of time trying to get the profile curve to snap to the apexes of the two star shapes which are on different planes. I was trying to add other lines and geometry to get snap points at those locations with limited success. So I guess I end up with all those sketches that I delete in the model but their vestiges remain in the browser. I'm finding that snapping between sketches is not always happening the way I would hope. 

Other issues seem to pop up too that make me try different sketches that muddy the picture. If I make one spline curve on the XY plane, I can easily mirror and pattern it. But when I copy that curve, scale it up and move it to a different plane (5mm in Z), I can't mirror or pattern it. Even copying and pasting to a different construction plane doesn't work. It seems it's still linked to the original curve and there's no way to break that link.

Thanks for your help. John