Positioning holes in 3D

- [Man] There are two basic ways to use the Hole Wizard. Number one is by choosing a flat plane, and then adding holes to that plane, or we can operate in 3D space. If you're operating in 3D you can place holes on any surface in 3D. Now let me show you, how that works. Firs thing's first, come over here to features, click on the Hole Wizard, let's go ahead and just choose something like a tapped hole. So over here I'm going to choose a straight tap. Come down here to a bottom-tapped hole, and actually I'm going to switch over here to the inches system.

Click over here on inch, here it is. And the size is going to be 1/4 inch. So let's use 1/4-20, all right, and instead of through all I'm just going to make it blind, 1/2 inch deep looks good, you have to drill a little bit deeper so you can tap the hole. All that looks great. Down here I'm going to add the thread callout, which looks fine. Alright, now we're ready to start placing our holes. So go over here to positions, and notice because I didn't preselect a face, it's asking me if I'd like to start a 3D sketch. And the answer is yes, let's go ahead and do that.

So any face you place a hole on, this one over here, that one over there, you can place holes on any one of these faces because we're operating in 3D. So pretty cool and pretty handy. If you're done placing holes, hit escape to turn it off, and now you can also do something like placing a line to help you locate where those holes might be. So over here I'm going to click on a corner, and come up here to another corner. And go ahead and take this point here, and snap it to that midpoint. So there it is going to be snapped to the midpoint, so now I've located where this hole is in 3D space.

Same thing up here, if you want to click on one of these other surfaces, you can then create some construction geometry to place where these holes might end up. So I'm going to go ahead and make a line across that entire part there, and maybe do one more over here, a couple of center lines you can place on there, you might even place a circle, something like this, so you might say here's a circle, it's going to snap to there. And now you can hit these intersections. So I can intersect where these two lines might be coming together. So you can place this point over here on this line by saying these are coincident, right? And you can then bring these back down to size.

Of course we can add a dimension over here. I'm going to say 3.0. Now what happened though is because we're in 3D space, look what happened, we have this like circle out in space. So that can cause some issues for you and I do want to point out how to avoid that. So if you are going to work in 3D space, don't try to add all this stuff in 3D space because it's just going to be kind of floating around in space, and you don't really have a lot of control over it. Over here, because we did anchor to two different corners, it does work out pretty good.

But if you're trying to just draw on a face or a plane, sometimes it can get a little bit out of control. So I recommend, instead of doing it this way, let's go ahead and delete this out, what I'd recommend is getting out of the sketch first, or out of that feature, taking your history bar, rolling it up before that feature, then go ahead and start a sketch on one of these faces, you then might want to draw something like a circle, or some end points, something like a center line from one side over here to the other, and we can do a couple more of those, so we'll just go ahead and place a few of these across that part.

And now we have these intersection points, so you can intersect this with another line. So I'm going to say 2.5 over here, and then let's go ahead and add a couple points. So I'm going to make a point that intersects between the two of those, intersects between the two of those, same thing over here. Alright, so now we've added these little points around our mall, so they know where they are. Now when we exit out of that sketch, we have this sketch here to kind of define where things are going to be. You could also choose these other faces over here and start a sketch, something like adding a line from one side to the other, you can unsnap to layer, and by doing this it's actually going to make it really easy to place those 3D holes.

So come down here back, let's roll that back forward. Go back here and modify this feature, and now because I've already modified it I can actually snap these holes right to those intersections. Because we've already added those intersections in an earlier sketch, now we can just use them to place the holes very easily, and then we can go ahead and get out of that command, and hit delete on the other holes, and just remove the holes that happen to be causing trouble for us, let's get rid of those bad ones. And we've got a bunch of good ones here.

Same thing over here, like this hole here, let's go ahead and delete that one, or just drag it somewhere else, so we don't really need these holes. Then, of course, if you want to you can go back and turn on that point command, come over here to a surface, and notice as I go over that midpoint there, it highlights so I can snap to it, and that makes it really easy, and straightforward to add holes. So let's try that one more time. So there it is, let's take that point, snap it right to there, and that should be adding a hole, but let's see what's going on here, why that's not working. Okay, there he is.

Alright, so now we got that hole on that, I think we had two holes right on top of each other, and that's what was causing the issue. But anyway, these are the key points for adding holes in 3D space. The cool thing about being able to add in 3D space is all the holes on all those surfaces are all exactly the same. That way if you want to modify something in the future, all you need to do is go back to that one Hole Wizard feature, change that hole and all the holes throughout the entire design will automatically update, as long as you created them all at the same time using the same Hole Wizard feature, so that really does make it easy to switch between styles of holes on the fly, using that one Hole Wizard feature.