Archive for June 17th, 2008
June 17th, 2008 | 
Author: I learned this little trick while trying to help someone extrude some text on a curvy surface. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of you knew of a different way to achieve the same results. That’s one of the things I like about SolidWorks: there’s so many different ways to go! I must confess it used to drive me nuts in the beginning, when I was constantly wondering if I was doing it right. I mean, it looked right, but was it really right? While I can’t exactly say that there is a right or wrong way to do things in SolidWorks, it is true that some can be faster or more efficient than others, or may work better for your particular design intent. So, if you know a better way to do this, by all means, do share!
So, we were trying to extrude text on a curvy surface, a round (fillet) to be more precise. Using wrap was out the question, given the kind of surface, so we thought about extruding the text from a tangent plane, up to the fillet surface, like in this image.
It looked OK, but if you notice, the thickness of the text isn’t uniform. It becomes more obvious in a side view of the model; notice how the extruded text follows the shape of the plane on one side and the shape of the fillet surface on the other. The size and depth of the text and the radius of the fillet can also make the uneven thickness more obvious.
So, after thinking about it for a while, we tried something different. First, we created a new surface, an offset of the fillet surface, by applying Offset Surface from the Surfaces Toolbar. Face 1 in the image is the face of the fillet and the 0.02 in, in this case, is the offset distance.
The text was sketched on a different plane, an offset from the first plane, and located behind the fillet surface. The text was then extruded from the sketch plane up to the offset surface previously created.
The result was text with an even thickness that follows the shape of the fillet surface.
So, how would you do it? Please, share!
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