- The Shell command allows me to take a solid
and then hollow it out.
I can remove one
or multiple faces during the same operation.
Let me show you how it works.
So I have a part open right here
and right up here at the top of the screen,
I have a command called Shell
and right over here in the faces to remove box
I can choose something like bottom of the box.
And then I can define how thick I'd like to shell
or the thickness of my final part.
All right, we also have the option for coming down here
and doing multi body or multi thickness parts.
But right now let's just go ahead
and just do the most basic style of shell.
Click on OK and you can see what happens,
it actually just cuts away all that material.
And let's go ahead and section our part,
you can see there
it's all one uniform wall thickness throughout the part.
So it's a really powerful command.
Just one click
I can literally remove all that material that quickly.
All right, now let's go back and modify that one more time.
So here's my Shell command.
Now if you want to choose multi thickness
so you can choose something like this face right here.
And I say,
well I want that one to be a little bit thicker, right?
So this is generally not a good idea by the way
because when you're injection molding apart
or die casting apart
you want everything to be a uniform thickness.
So multiple thicknesses are generally frowned upon,
but hey we can do it.
Go ahead and click over here.
Then come over here and click on that and notice over here
this part is thicker and these other parts are thinner.
So of course SolidWorks can do it
but sometimes things you can do
in the software are not things you actually want to do
in the real world.
So keep that in mind.
Let me jump over to another part here,
I've got a second example
and this one is a jug and notice it's solid right now.
If I cut it in half, you can see that it's completely solid
and we want to make this thing hollow.
So come back up here to shell.
I'm going to choose the top surface right over here.
Let's make this thickness 0.15, and let's go ahead
and just shell it out right now automatically.
We have a nice jug that can hold some water
or something else tasty
and take a look at the section view here.
And you can see is a nice uniform wall thickness throughout.
Now, I also want to point out
we can remove more than just that top surface.
So let's go back to that Shell command.
Now, right here, I've removed the top.
I can go back in there.
I can remove more faces.
How about the bottom?
If I do that as well,
now what I have is a tube.
And if you want to be even more fancy than that
let's go ahead and choose a couple other faces like this.
So I can add as many faces
as I'd like to my Shell command
and it's going to remove all those faces
and just keep the ones that you leave
and make that wall thickness the same.
So Shell command is a very powerful command.
It allows you to do quite a bit with only a few clicks.
And definitely if you're working
with anything that's like blow molded or injection molded
and you want to have uniform wall thickness
it really is the tool for the job.