Creating a Wheel Blade Bracket in SolidWorks

Throughout these SolidWorks tutorials, we'll cover a number of methods to create a wheel blade bracket. We'll look at the different options associated with the draft feature and an alternative design using surfacing tools. The draft feature is often associated with Mold Tools, which specializes in the design of molds for plastic injection molding. Using just the default settings the draft feature simply creates an angled surface on a part so that it will easily break away from the mold. However, when going beyond the basics the tool will create useful and sometimes exotic forms that are difficult to produce using the typical SolidWorks modeling tools. At the end of this tutorial, an analysis of the form of our solid model with its complicated angles and surfaces will show some undesirable and unnatural geometry on the corners of our bends that is hard to avoid and correct using solid modeling techniques. Therefore, we'll delete our solid model features and, using the leftover sketch geometry of our solid model, recreate our part using various surfacing tools as well as discussing options and traps along the way. At the end of this SolidWorks training, our model will be much more natural and uniform, allowing for the creation of a sheet metal flat pattern from its final form. Software required: SolidWorks 2012 and higher.