help with extrusion

[greenwoods1462]

Hello,

I have created the attached component made from two imported sub comonents.   I now want to extrude a small cut into the component (to illustrate I have a small circle on a tangent plane.   I have done this before many times but for some reason I cannot extrude a cut this time.  Is it because I can only extrude a cut into a body and not a component?

Appologies if this is a basic question - just scratching my head trying to work out why and run out of ideas.

[davebYYPCU · Accepted solution]

Correct you can not cut into a Component, unless there is a body in it, and

then you are cutting into it's body, and not the Component.

Might help...

[jeff_strater]

@greenwoods1462  - Just want you to be perfectly clear on this.  Yes, cuts occur on bodies, but the bodies CAN be inside a component.  I suspect the problem that you are encountering is that you have inserted external designs into your main design.  External components cannot be modified by a feature in the top-level design.  Internal components, however, can be modified this way.  The "link" icon in the browser differentiates external and local components.

You can modify external components using "Edit in Place", but that is a bit of an advanced topic.

[greenwoods1462]

Thank you.  The challenge I have is that i build the two parts of the engine seperately and then pull them into one design called assembly.   Posat printing I want to fit pipework along the length of the assembly.   This is completed using wire after the printing, but i do want to put some retaining holes in the 3D print.

A while back I worked out a way to convert the component back to a body using an export command but that does not seem to work now.  I guess my question is whether it is possible to make a hole in a component.

Many thanks in advance I appreciate the support.