complicated sketch

Howdy all and thanks for all replies.

I'm pretty new to Solidworks and am finding it a lot more complicated than a competing product...anyway, i'm trying to do a sketch that will be the path for a sweep. Basically, if you took your regular old 20" piece of copper wire and crumpled it up in a ball, that is basically what I'm trying to draw. It doesn't actually have that many curves and arcs, but a few on many planes, so I'm just not sure how to go about this...

I've drawn several planes and sketched the flat parts on them. Different sketches, I assume obviously. Where they intersect, the program won't fillet to any size.

Can someone just throw out a few keywords of things I can research and play with in the tutorials / help stuff? Someone here at work suggested that I draw major flat areas on planes, then use "insert / curve". I'm looking into that now...any other strategies out there? All suggestions will help, as I am new and need to learn all of what anyone has to say.

Thanks!

Mickey

For complicated sketches like that, I would sometimes extrude a surface imagining it as a projection from that view. Then I would extrude another surface at 90degrees to the 1st one, again imagining the projection from this view. You can then get a 3D curve which is where the planes intersect.


Another way to do it is use a 3D sketch though I never like using that feature tool.


Hope that helps a bit


Michael

Hi Michael. Thanks for the reply.

I'm not finding much success with 3-D sketch. It seems to simply be a compilation of 2-D sketches, which doesn't help me create curves that pass through infinite points on all axises.

I thought of the extrude too this morning...thanks...I'll give it a try. I'm figuring that I'll have to extrude out curved parts of the drawing with four flat sides, then fillet the sides to make all four surfaces one round part....