Hi anyone know of any good aeromodelling tutorials for solidworks?

Here is one.

http://www.solidworksf16.com/download-tutorial.php

thanks ptxman have you done this tutorial? is it good?

Yes, I bought it a while back. I'm no SW expert, but gaining proficiency & this helped. On the plus side it, you will learn a lot of useful surfacing techniques specific to aircraft applications. Starts with setup & import of scale multi-view documentation dwgs as background. Lost of spline curves, lofts & sectioning techniques to make good, progressive surfaces. Many of these techniques are just easire to understand ast they drawn vs. reading about tools from a book IMO.

The end result is essentially a surface 'shell' though, there are no real internals or structure. But if you know the conventional side of SW (parts & assemblies etc), this would be pretty easy. The airfoils as I recall were pretty simplistic shapes, basically spline curves visually matched to source drawing sections so kind of fictional. In a real design you would utilize airfoil coordinates & working surfaces from that. Guess I'm trying to say its not an all encompassing aircraft design video, but it fills an important gap in some of the harder to grasp, less-well documented techniques related to surfacing techniques.

there are plenty of sw tutorials on Youtube. While none are specificly for aeromodels, the same basic principles do apply.

Question: does anyone know how to make a mold in Solidworks from a part modeled as a surface?

Background: I'm a pretty experienced Solidworks guy, been using it for 5 years or so, full time some days. I can pretty much loft anything from anything. When building my latest set of DLG tails I modeled them as surfaces, as it was much faster. However, I cannot extrude to this surface, or use any of the mold generation tools within Solidworks. My workaround was to re-build the parts as a solid loft, and the rest of the tool chain is happy. However, not being able to make a mold from a surface is frustrating, as its pretty clear some of the parts in the Solidworks examples are surfaces (many plastic parts are modeled this way). Does anyone have some tips and suggestions?

Originally Posted by samc99us

Question: does anyone know how to make a mold in Solidworks from a part modeled as a surface? Background: I'm a pretty experienced Solidworks guy, been using it for 5 years...

Sounds like you have a lot more SW experience than me, but I'll give it a crack by parroting a tutorial video on this topic. The workflow is:
- join the individual surfaces together
- cap any open surface ends as necessary
- basically prep & stitch the individual surfaces together to the point that they now fully enclosed a single volume.

So for example a simple 'can' made from 2 circular end discs + 1 cylindrical pipe (all zero thickness surfaces of course) would change from 3 seperate surface entities in the tree to only 1 single surface body in the tree. I presume this single entity is a SW's confirmation that it's a legal, 'water tight' enclosed surface ready for making a solid.

Then to make solid:
- command Insert Boss/Base
- Thicken
- select the enclosed volume, it highlights as colored
- toggle the checkbox 'create solid from enclosed volume'.
- the solid body is formed (or...at least it worked in the tutorial! )
- from there you have a solid wing & should be good to go using mold tools or boolean subtraction from blocks to make the female mold solids
Or at this point, you could alternately Thicken to either side of the stiched surface & make a shell of the wing if that was of benefit for molds requiring an offset allowance ..somewhat similar to an actual skin structure.

I could'nt find much on youtube or public domain how-to's but some of these links suggest it might be a reasonable approach.
https://forum.solidworks.com/thread/54502
http://www.ehow.com/how_12036582_mak...olidworks.html

Having said that, when I was messing around with wings in SW-2011, I managed to blow things up pretty regularly. I've since learned a few things that cause problems. Usually always its bad geometry that can't be solved: edges that are not truly intersecting, or not intersecting for their entire length, over-lapping surfaces, edge-to edge ie. non-intersecting bodies... So I'm kind of anxious to get back into airplane things again one day. Hope this helps, if you get it figgered, please share!

That certainly provides some great ideas. I'll try to put a tutorial together once I figure it out.

I found two ways of doing molds from surface models:
1. combining surface in one area and use the "replace face", so that your area has replaced the surface of solid representing the molds.
This method does not work sometimes because of problems with joining surfaces.

2. export the surface model to Parasolid. When you import parasolid into a new file, SW repair surfaces and you can use the mold generation tools.

For me it works perfectly.

regards
AD