The first training session I attended was presented by Charles Culp, who is very well known at the SolidWorks Forums.  Charles was introducing all of us to a series of useful surfacing techniques, including how to convert a solid body into a surface body, fix some geometry, and then turn it back into a solid, the proper use of Delete Face and Delete Hole, the advantages of using Replace Face, and the difference between a boundary surface and a filled surface.  I arrived a bit late, but still managed to see him fixing a funny looking fillet located in a corner, similar to the one circled in red in this image. I tried really hard to reproduce what he had, but mine doesn’t quite look the same.

Anyway, he showed us how to trim and delete faces from the fillet, and then use Fill Surface with tangent option to patch the hole with a new, smooth surface, just like you see here in this image.

Of course, like I said before, my example isn’t exactly like his, so I did a few things differently to be able to delete the right faces, but the method and result are pretty much the same.

He also demonstrated how to model a telephone cord, by first creating a helix that follows a 3D spline. This is what he did: He started by opening a 3D Sketch and creating a 3D spline on it. Next,  he created the sketch of a line on the plane normal to the 3D spline at one of its ends and used it to create a Swept Surface, using the option to twist along path, as you can see in this image. The result is a helical surface that follows the path of the 3D spline.

He opened a new 3D sketch and selected the edge of the helical surface, then used Convert Entities to create a sketch of a helix.

Then he created a reference plane normal to one of the ends of that helix and sketched the cross section of the cord.

Finally, he created the telephone cord using the Swept Boss feature, with the sketch of the cross section as a profile and the helix as path. No need to twist this time around.

I wish this had been  a hands-on session, if only to have a copy of the original examples Charles used for his presentation. It’s OK; even though it wasn’t a hands-on session,  it was full of useful  information just the same. I believe the procedures of this and other sessions will be available in March. Until then, all I have to offer is my condensed version.

Stick around.  More chronicles from SWW2010 are  on their way!