Keeping this simple. I want to create 2 cylinders, loft and shell them (each face has a different diameter) and then create 2 more similar cylinders, loft and shell them then join the two resulting bodies. I am using the loft tool as this was the only optioned revealed by extensive searching. The loft tool needs two sketch planes.
Yesterday, I was somehow able to start this by creating two sketch planes on the same origin. Today Shapr3d will not let me do it. I saw another post that suggested that if the origins are the same, it will keep unhiding sketch plane 1 and forcing you to sketch on it, which it does in my case which is driving me nuts.
This seems counter intuitive. The one tutorial I have followed, in my opinion, quite logically, states that one should create the constituent parts of the model independently and then join them. This seems quite difficult if you can’t create objects that need to be aligned on the origin.
Thanks Mike - that is close to what I want to do. I’ll give it a go in the morning and report back. Thanks again for taking the trouble to give such a clear and comprehensive reply.
Mike- Many thanks. Firstly, I could not find any reference to ‘work plane’, so I selected ‘add plane’ and created a plane at a vertical offset (z axis). Sometimes when I select the plane I have just created, the original sketch plane unhides itself (Grrrr…). Sometimes it doesn’t. Basically, if I delete, start from scratch and attempt the work in an identical sequence, sometimes it behaves as expected, sometimes it doesn’t.
Also. after creating essentially 2 rings and moving them so that the two bodies are next to each other, one with a 33mm inside diameter, one with a 33mm outside diameter, I cant find a way of joining them. The only tool that seems a possibility is ‘align’. Would an overlap of 0.1mm allow this to be used?
