Cut Out with a tolerance

We are a school which has been graced with the good fortune of Pro-E and a Z-corp Rapid Prototype machine. We use the Cell Phone tutorial as our primary tool for beguinning students to learn to use Pro-E and it is also the practice printout for the 3-D Printer.

The problem we have is that the keypad does not fit into the front cover; To make the holes for the keys, it uses the Cut Out feature. Some others and I from our school have attempted to find a way to add a tolerance to the Cut Out to make it easier for the keypad model to slide in. As of yet we have found nothing; The solution we are currently using is one we made up in which we create a keypad with larger keys and use it to cut out, then we revert to the smaller keypad while still referencing the larger one. This is cumbersome, and it confuses many of the students. Any better suggestions would be very helpful; We have just gotten the driver working for the RP Machine, and will start running it for the classes on monday.

Clinton,


What you can try doing after the initial cut out operation is open the part with the cut out in it. Then once that part is open sketch on the surface looking at the cut out and then select the cut outs to be references to use once in sketcher. Then create an entity by offsetting an edge and insert your tolerance there for the offset and you'llhave a biggercut out then before that you can easily tolerence.This wayyour still using the cut out operation and only adding a sketching step instead of inserting anotherkeypad.

You should be able to offset the surfaces and then trim to them.