Turning Specific - the Shaft Creation

▶️ You can watch a video at the bottom of page: click here

The shaft creation command draws turning parts in wireframe geometry. You can find it in the Shaft design section of the Turning module.

Presentation

The shaft menu is divided in 4 menus:

	Shaft Creation	You find the shaft creation and commands to add fillets, chamfers and also specific stock allowances.
	Creation	This menu is a ‘light’ menu of Wireframe/Drawing. You find there the useful commands to combine with the automatic creation of shaft.
	Drawing Finish	Same as the Wireframe/Drawing Finish menu.
	Import Cleaning	Commands useful when importing 2D CAD files (DXF, DWG…)

Principle

The principle of the Creation of Shaft is an chained design of lengths, diameters and cones, with automatic display of dimensions. The design is also completely parameterized.

You can combine the shaft creation with wireframe standard commands as shown in the next example for the design of the groove. We use the circle creation then the Drawing command to finish the shape.

By default, the design in turning is defined at diameter. To change it to Radius mode, do a right-click on the background and unset the checkbox Revolution Plane Radius.

You can watch a short video here showing this function:

Turning geometry with radius dimensioning-20240814-110748.png

For design in Turning, the choice of Diameter or Radius coordinates has been moved from the popup menu to the status bar. It is a switch button.

The current mode is the one visible in the status bar so that you have this information in the screen.

The Shaft Creation

The Shaft Creation is a powerful, easy design tool.

Draw diameters, lengths, and cone shapes alternately. Add fillets and chamfers later using the dedicated commands: Fillet

, Chamfers .

Shaft creation enables you to modify values and update all calculations (including machining operations). Use it for part families. You can create the entire shape without entering values; dimensions display in pink to indicate they are not fixed.

To modify the values, simply double-click on the dimension or on the element, or choose Edit element. The value can be modified in a RapidEdit menu, as shown below. The dimension recovers the black color.

The next example shows the same part drawn on-the-fly, then saved with 2 different sizes.

Use and Features

Start the design by selecting a point, then the shaft device activates automatically and alternatively lengths (along Z-axis) [1] and diameters (along X-axis) [2].

To design a cone, click icon [3],

Then choose among the 3 modes of creation:

	Angle and Length
	Length and Diameter
	Angle and Diameter

Then you can be back by clicking on either the Diameter command [4] or the Length command [5].

When you enter positive values on the fields, they are applied with direction of the button Z-Minus [6] or Z-Plus [7]

In addition to that, you can easily just copy the diameter of a previous one by clicking on its line. This also has the advantage to link the various line segments with each other. As such, if you modify one of the diameter, the others will also change automatically.

You can find a video on the right showing this manipulation.

Coordinates system

By default, the design is done in relative mode.
The user can switch from Relative [1] to Absolute [2] and vice versa by selecting the icon

for Relative and for Absolute mode.

If a dimension is given according to a point that is not the origin of the Revolution plane, you can declare this new ‘origin’ with the button [3] and then click the point. All the next elements will be designed according to this new origin.

Grid: when you design elements, you can maintain the Ctrl key to call the grid with predefined steps values.

▶️ You can watch a video showing an example of a Shaft Creation:

Advises regarding the display of dimensions

To move the dimensions

Do a right-click on the dimension. Here are 3 commands

	Move	To move a dimension
	Text Move	To move only the text of one dimension
	Dimensioning Alignment	To align the dimension to one reference dimension

To hide the dimensions

	Access to the dialog box of filters
	In the tab Elements, uncheck the icon to hide all the dimensions (the icon becomes grey).