SOLIDWORKS Tech Tip on Delete Face: Move a Face From a Solid or Surface Body

Learn how to easily delete a face from a solid or surface body when modeling in SOLIDWORKS. John Setzer, our Training Product Manager, provides helpful SOLIDWORKS Tech Tips on our blog as well: www.gsc-3d.com/blog/author/jn...
Curious what other capabilities are available in SOLIDWORKS CAD? Take a look at our software pages and learn about included features:
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Partial Video Transcript:
[00:00:27] So let's first find out how to find the delete face command. You can find it by going to the menu, insert face, delete. You can also customize your command manager, just right click and bring up your direct adding toolbar, and you'll find the delete face there. You can go ahead and run that command. Let's take a look at some of the options that we have.
[00:00:55] Um, first of all, you're going to be selecting one or more faces to remove from your body. Yeah. And, uh, as I do this, uh, I'll be able to pick a face such as this one or three faces or de-select them and go back to the one from our selection boxes, adding or subtracting faces from that selection set. In the options area, we have three options, delete, delete and patch and delete and fill. Let's go with just straight delete and with selected face, accept it, and we can see what we have as a result. So face has been removed from our solid body, which means it's not a solid body anymore. It no longer encloses the volume. You can see as they rotate, you can see the quote inside of the model.
[00:01:43] Again, that's because, well, there is no inside, outside definition for volume. We just have a surface body, no longer closing of volume. You'll note that the edge color. Where the gap is is blue, because blue indicates the end of the world, if you will, for a surface body. So that's where our gap is. As we see inside that face is removed.
[00:02:06] It's now a surface body. Let's edit the delete face feature that we just added and take a look into deleting patch, what delete and patch does, is it well removes the face selected certainly, and then it keeps the solid body definition. By extending existing surfaces or faces to put patch over the gap. The results in this situation would be, as we see these three faces extend to fill what was the left or the gap here I left behind by the remove face.
[00:02:41] If I were to edit that feature and pick all four of these faces, deleted and patch. This would be the result as the planar face is simply extending each other. Basically making this a block again,
[00:03:05] delete and fill, I'm going to right click clear selections and then simply pick this face again and we'll do delete and fill and there's an option under, do they even feel for tangent. Or not, um, to delete and fill, well, what's that's gonna do is remove the face or faces, that you selected and replace it with one new face.
[00:03:28] And that new face can be calculated to be tangent to every edge that the new face is connecting to or simply be connected and not necessarily worried about being tangent. If I say delete and fill without tangency. And we examined the results. It doesn't look like much has changed, but if I moved to this position, you can see how this has flattened out because the new face that was created in place of the old face does not have a tangent condition to these other faces at these edges where they meet.
[00:04:01] Simply put something there, make a new surface in that spot, but just worry about being connected. Don't worry about being tangent or smooth. If I were to edit the delete face. And put tangency in. Well then it looks like the face was never really deleted, but in fact, it was, this face was deleted and then a new face is putting in its place.
[00:04:23] It's exactly like the previous one. It wouldn't be much of a point to it and this particular situation, but if I edit the delete face and I pick these other three faces to go along with it, and we do this delete and fill, I'm going to turn off the tangent fill for this. Then we'll see the results. Well that operation, so four faces removed left with one single face, which is curvature, continuous spline based, but there's no tangency control.
[00:04:57] So this face is not necessarily tangent to this face at this edge or at this edge. Certainly wouldn't be at this, this face, at that edge. If I did turn on tangent fell for this. I'd get a pretty funky looking surface because what's happening is this face is being calculated to be tangent to this face at this common edge.
[00:05:22] So kind of pulls it in and pulls it back out, kind of swoops it out so that there is tangent to see on the inside portion, not what we would want here, but it does show, it does show how the different options affect the results with the delayed phase come in.
[00:05:42] So where might we use the delete face command? Well, it's actually a really good tool for cleaning up things.