ST5 What’s New: Slots and Holes

One of the best new geometry creation tools in ST5 in my opinion is Slots. They’ve added great functionality in both synch and ordered environments.

Draw the centerline of the slot, then invoke the Slot command (under Hole). From there you can select some options, including raised or counterbored slots, round or square corners. This tool works great for regular parts and sheet metal. It even does some odd stuff you might never do, as shown below. The upper slot is a raised counterbore (kind of odd name) through slot, and the bottom one is blind. Not that it’s machinable, just that the capability is there. This was all from a single command.

The slot shows up in synch as a procedural feature, which makes it easy to edit. You can edit the sketch for the path (even in synch! because it’s a procedural feature), or any of the other dimensional parameters. By changing the height of the counterbore you can even make a raised cbr into a recessed cbr or vice versa. Procedural features in Synch Tech are worth a deeper look.

Another really nice thing is the Recognize Holes option, which is new to ST5. What this does is recognize holes that were  part of an imported part. When holes are created by this method, they are not created as procedural features, so you don’t have as many automatic options when editing them. Recognize Holes turns “dumb” holes into procedural features.

This part was made somewhere else, then imported to Solid Edge via Parasolid, a very stable translation. In fact, when you are translating out of SolidWorks, the most recommended format is Parasolid. When it was brought in to SE, I ran the Recognize Holes command you see in the first image in this post. Synch Tech added the procedural hole features to the Path Finder.

Here you can change the parameters for one hole, and they all update. This is one of the ways that Solid Edge has a huge advantage especially when working with imported geometry. You don’t lose all of the intelligence when you move geometry from a history based software to synch tech.