- [Instructor] When you're working with molded parts
or cast parts, a lot of times you want verify that you
don't have any thick sections or thin sections
in your model, and SOLIDWORKS has a nice tool called
Thickness Analysis which will allow us to do that.
Over here I have a little section here I've added which
is extra thick, which is probably going to be the problem
section, but I also have a couple other features here
that we're going to evaluate.
So, go ahead and click on "Thickness Analysis."
Over here you have your target thicknesses, and then you
have your maximum down here you can put,
and click on "calculate" and it's going to go ahead
and process what you have here, and you can then see where
the thick sections in your model are, you can kind of mouse
over them and see how thick the material is
in those sections, and you can see here
it kind of tapers off as we get to the corners,
but you can clearly see if there really is a thicker
section that's going to cause you a lot of trouble,
so clearly this one here in the center is going
to be causing us trouble.
The rest of the part looks pretty good, nothing looks too
out of shape, I've got a couple of things down here that
can add a little bit of material, but over all,
clearly this is going to be the problem, so,
in that case we'd probably core that out from the inside,
or remove some of that material so that it is all
uniform thickness across my model.
This sometimes will find thicknesses that you might
have overlooked in your design.
You can quickly run this and see if there's any hot spots
or thick sections that you're seeing with this bright
red color here that's going to be an obvious issue
for molding or casting.
It's a pretty straightforward and easy tool to be using,
again, I can come down here and make some changes for the
colors and some of the different performance things
like that, of course, also the resolution at the bottom here
and then click on "okay" when you're done,
and that is the Thickness Analysis Tool.