Thread Feature??? Why did no one tell me about this?
So I’m modeling away, building parts for an old bicycle coaster brake hub, because, well, hell, why not, and I’m looking for the Cosmetic Thread feature. I’m
still kind of in book writing mode, so my SW interface is all generified, no custom setup, just stock, right out of the box with some weird size stuff going on to make icons visible in the book. When I come across a feature called Thread. 
It looks like this was added in 2016 during my time doing something else.
Huh, And it even does what I think it should do. I’m like, yeah, wow, I could have used this a while ago, why now? Just so you know, questions like that never get you anywhere, take it from me.
Anyway, look at this thing. Trim with start face? Oh, yeah, we needed that. That setting takes a goofy left-footed looking thread and makes it look right. You won’t really cut threads with this geometry, but when you need (ok, want) it to look like geometry, you need these settings.
I can even use this to cut the 6-start thread on the brake driver without getting all geeky on the helix and swept cuts! These are the kind of mechanical features that SW should be adding instead of effing with the icons and making a 4th way to manage multiple bodies in a part.
Bottle threads even? Wow. Nice. And the ability to offset the end of the thread? Now we can stop worrying about how to at least start threads without being a sweeps wizard.
Anyway, very nice. 15 years late. But very nice.
Here’s about 5 clicks worth of effort. Of course you’ll want to make a simplified representation of this, since it will kill you at the top level assembly. And really, you only really need to explicitly model threads for a couple of reasons:
- You’re gonna 3D print it
- You’re gonna mold it
- You wanna make a cool-looking model
And it even makes a passable nut, but you have to fiddle with the settings for trimming start and end faces, and offsetting the thread as well. They might be able to simplify all of that if they tried.
You probably won’t use something like this to CNC a thread onto a shaft or in a hole – we have other processes and tools for that which are much more efficient.
But still. Cool stuff. Thanks for adding.