Learning More About Pulling

This post is the second in a series on learning ANSYS SpaceClaim. After over 31 years of CAD use, it has become difficult for me to learn new tools. In this series I will share my experience as I explore and learn how to use this fantastic tool.
If you have not read the previous post, start here.  A table of contents is here.

As I explored ANSYS SpaceClaim in my first try, it became obvious that a lot of capabilities that are in multiple operations in most CAD systems, are all combined in Pull for SpaceClaim.  In this posting I feel like it would be a really good idea for me to really understand all the things Pull can do.

Start with the Manual

Not very exciting or adventurous. But there is so much in this operation that I feel like I will miss something critical if I don’t read up first.   It states:

“Use the Pull tool to offset, extrude, revolve, sweep, and draft faces; use it to round, chamfer, extrude, copy, or pivot edges. You can also drag a point with the Pull tool to draw a line on a sketch plane.”

Let’s think about that for a second.  What it is basically saying is if I pull on an object of a given dimension, it creates an object that is one higher dimension. Point pulls to a curve, a curve pulls to a face, and a face pulls to a solid. Kind of cool. The big surprise for me is that there is no round or fillet command. To make a round you pull on an edge. This is change.

Pull some Stuff

I started by reading my block with a hole back in.

This fillet pull thing scares me so I thought I’d confront it first. So selecte Pull, and selected an edge:

Then I dragged it away from the block. Nothing. You can’t create a surface that way. Then I dragged in towards the center. A round was created.

If anything, too simple. Back in my day, adding a round to an edge took skill and experience!

So next I think I want to try and change the size of something. Maybe the diameter of the hole. So I select the cylinder’s face. Is shows the current radius. I could just change that value:

Instead I drag, and while I do that I noticed that there are two numbers, the current radius and the change to the radius!  Kind of cool. No, really useful.

You use tab to go between them. So I hit tab once, typed 3 then tab again (or return) and I get a 8 mm diameter.  I like the visual feedback as well as the ability to enter a specific change number.

Next thing that I felt like doing was rounding a corner. Put a 5mm round on the corner facing out:

So I grabbed the point and dragged, and got a line.

Remember, it only goes up one entity type – point to curve. Not point to surface. So I ctrl-clicked (that is how you select multiple entities) on the three curves that intersect at the corner:

Then I dragged and got my round.

Pulling Along or Around Something

This are all sort of dragging straight. After looking at the manual text it seems I can revolve and sweep as well with the Pull operation.  Cool. But what do I revolve or sweep around and along?  Looking at the manual (and it turns out the prompt on the screen) I use Alt-Clicking to define these control curves.  Let’s try it out by revolving something about that line I mistakenly made.

I click on one of the curves on the round. then Alt-Click the line – It turns blue. So there is a nice visual clue that it is different than the source curve.  Now I’ve also got spinny icons around the curve rather than pull icons.

So I drag and… funky revolved surface shows up. I had to spin the model to see it clearly:

Let me stop and share something special about this. In most other CAD tools, this would have involved multiple clicks, maybe even multiple windows. In SpaceClaim, it was Click, Alt-Click, Drag.  Nice.

Using the Pop=up Icons

As you play with the model you may start seeing some popup icons near the mouse when you select geometry while using pull. The compound round on the block is complicated, so I spun it around and grabbed just one edge and pulled it in to be a round.  Then I clicked on it and got this:

Not only can I put a value in there, I can drop ones I use a lot. I can also change my round to a chamfer, or I can change it to a variable radius. This is worth noting. In most other CAD tools you pick what type of thing you want to do to the edge. Here we start by dragging a round, then specify if it is a chamfer or a variable.

The variable radius is worth digging more in to.  I clicked on it and it was not intuitive as to what I should do. Let’s try help. Search on Variable Radius… duh. Click on the arrow that shows up and drag that. There are three arrows. The one in the middle scales both ends the same, the one on either end, well it sets the radius for either end.

Reading more I see if I hold down the CTRL key and click on the arrow, I can drag a new control point along the edge. I can type in a percentage as well.  Very useful.

Clicking on a control point and hitting delete, gets rid of them.

That’s just one icon that pops up.  Playing some more it seems the other icons control how it handles corners and multiple fillets merging… something to look at as I do more complex parts.

The other popup I want to look at is the Up To one.  It looks like an arrow on a surface.  In other tools I extrude, cut, revolve all the time to some other piece of geometry.  This is the way to do it in Space Claim.  Let’s say I want to pull a feature to the middle of my hole. First I sketch the outline on a face:

Then I select the outline, and get a popup. First thing I want to do is click on the + sign, because I want to add, not cut, then I click on the Up To and then select the axis of the hole:  

That is enough for pulling and for today.  In the next session it may be time to explore the Move command.