In part five of this series, we learnt about lofting. Sweeping is kind of like lofting, but it offers the ability to go around corners – in fact, just about any path you would like to stretch a shape out along.
To begin with, we will have a play about with sweeping, then we will apply the technique to improve the vee pulley example that we have used in the past couple of parts in this series.
Let us play
Fire up the Alibre Atom 3D program on your PC and click the Create New Part icon on the home page. You should now see the workspace screen with the three planes represented (Fig. 1).
It is easy to change the aspect of the view by moving the mouse around while holding down both left-and right-hand buttons. It will be good to see all three of those planes – XY, YZ, and ZX. When performing a sweep, it is necessary to have a ‘profile’, which is the cross-sectional shape of the item you are creating, and a ‘path’, which is the line along which the profile stretches. These two elements must be on planes that are at right angles to each other. Yes, it is hard to explain in words alone, so let’s just do it.
Keep it simple
To keep it simple, we will use a circular profile. Select the XY plane, and click the Activate 2D Sketch button at the left end of the tool ribbon.
Now, select the Circlebeen following this series. The sketch is now fully defined and you can hit the Deactivate Sketch button, which is where the Activate 2D Sketch button was.
