The First Method

The first strategy had the mounting holes, the holes for the screws, and no fillets on the fins. This strategy started with the first segment of the strip, the left end with the mounting holes. The origin was at the bottom left corner of back face of this segment. This segment was created by drawing the trapezoidal profile of the main body and extruding it. Two thru-hole features were then inserted into this solid to create the mounting holes. Next, a solid box was inserted to create the first fin. Then, the next segment of the strip was created by extruding the right face of the first segment. Two blind hole features (without threads) were inserted as the screw holes. The fin and the segment were then unioned. This new entity was then duplicated to create the proper number of evenly spaced segments. One more box was created for the final fin. The last segment was created by extruding the right face of the last copied segment, with the through hole features added for the mounting holes.

Several problems were encountered with this method. The final box and extrusion were located relative to the final copied segment. Instead of remembering that the segments were created relative to the final member of this group, CADDS5 remembered that it was created relative to the third screw segment of the strip, as the model had three such segments. This caused these final segments to be created in the wrong place when the total number of segments was changed from the original number. To get around this, the final segment of the strip was created by extruding the right face of the first segment of the strip. This caused another problem, as this final extrusion, when unioned with everything else, caused all the screw holes to be filled in. The last segment had to be created, then, by recreating the extrusion profile in the proper location. CADDS5 also remembered the particular segments selected to be unioned. If this number changed, the union wouldn't work properly. This problem was solved by selecting the first, second and last segments, and then selecting one of the remaining segments using the group modifier.

Last Modified: Wed Aug 28 14:41:29 EDT 1996