Issues with mirroring parts

[adam1234]

Hello all -

I am having difficulty with mirroring parts.

I have a part that has three planes of symmetry, so I would like to be able to draw an eighth-model (complete with fillets, etc), and mirror it over several planes in order to fill in the rest of the part.

The way I did it turned out to be quite a pain, since I had to select all of the features (extrusions, fillets, etc) by pointing and "shift-clicking" in order to mirror them.

It also seems as if SolidWorks does not like to use faces of mirrored objects as the face about which to mirror them again. After the first mirroring, I kept getting "Rebuild Errors: Could not find face or plane". This was especially strange, since the preview it showed before I tried to execute the mirror was exactly what I had wanted.

In the end, I had to define a bunch of extra planes in order to accomplish what seemed like it should have been pretty simple to do.

That said, I have two questions:

1. Is there any way to mirror the entire solid body (without having to select all of the features)?

2. Can I mirror a part across multiple planes at once?

Thanks!

Adam

 

[solidmonkey]

If it's symmetrical I would probably forget mirroring and use a circular pattern of your first body.

 

[michael3130]

Adam,


In your feature tree and in the mirror command select to mirror a solid body rather than all the features. You can select the solid body in the top of the feature tree.


I'm not sure about your question 2 though I don't think you can.


The reason I think you get the errors is that you have merged the bodies when you have mirrored them so then loose that reference face. It's safer to add additional planes and use them. Though if you select the right option not to merge the bodies you shouldn't have this problem.