I started learning SW some months ago and have got quite comfortable with it (love the parametric aspect) and thought I'd start drawing a cylinder head (DOHC 4 valve). All was going well until I got to the intake and exhaust ports. I've just spent 3 straight days of agony trying to do one intake port but can't manage it. I previously drew this engine up in Rhino 5.0 (I was really proud of how the port surfaces turned out in Rhino) but rather than try to import it, I just started again from scratch. My method was to sketch the cross section of all required items (ports, spark plug, cams, buckets, etc..) on a plane that runs across the middle of cyl 1. There are 2 (intake) valves that are either side of cyl 1 plane and their respective runners join together into one opening on the port face (side of head) so I made a plane on the required angle. Here’s where things went wrong in several areas and I’ve spent plenty of time on Google and YouTube prior to asking for help here.
(1) Getting the cross sectional sketch of the port from cyl1 plane to cyl1 angled plane, as it seems in SW you can’t project a sketch to an angled plane like you can in Rhino. (you can but it doesn’t produce the required results. See Temp3.SLDPRT) I tried drawing the sketch in 3D sketch but it was nowhere near what I wanted and even worse was trying to draw the circles (for loft/boundary) when the guide line isn't in the usual XYZ planes.
(2) I tried Loft and Boundary Cuts many many times and even after adjusting the points I always end up with a poor quality surface (wrinkles causes by self-intersections in the cut even though the reference geometry (guides) are just simple slow splines. Funny thing is that I tried it now (Temp4.SLDPRT) (even though it’s a loft rather than a loft or boundary CUT but doubt that affects things) and it looks quite acceptable so I think the problem must be my poor quality loft/boundary references, i.e. the 3D sketch based off the guides produced in the sketch on the angled plane.
I’ll be happy just to receive some pointers on this one but just in case someone wants to have a go at the real thing, I've included a much cut down version of the original file. (I got rid of all the warnings I could that had resulted from removing the majority of the sketches and features (valves, plugs, other cylinders, etc.) from that file but a few still remain.)
Cheers
EDIT: Please find the attachments further on in later post.