Keeping and Removing Faces

The Remove Lump command lets you reshape a body by removing material. To remove material, either you specify the faces you wish to remove or conversely, the faces you wish to keep. In some cases, you need to specify both the faces to remove and the faces to keep.

Using this command is a good way to get rid of cavities you inadvertently created. 

This task illustrates how to reshape a body by removing the faces you do not need. Depending on the faces you select for removal, you will obtain two distinct bodies.
Open the RemoveLump.CATPart document.

  1. Select the body you wish to reshape, that is Part Body.

  2. Click Remove Lump .
    The Remove Lump Definition dialog box appears. You just need to specify the faces you wish to remove as well as the faces you need to keep.

  3. Click the Faces to remove field and select the colored face.
    From V5R15 onwards, you can get an idea of the result just by clicking the Preview button.
    The selected face appears in pink, meaning that it will be removed during the operation.

  4. Click OK.
    The new body looks like this:

  5. Now, delete Trim.1 in the specification tree and repeat steps 1 and 2.

  6. In the dialog box that appears, click the Faces to remove field and select the bottom face.
    This face appears in pink.

  7. Click OK.
    The new body looks like this :
 
The faces selected as the faces to be kept are displayed in blue.

You cannot re-apply Assemble, Add, Trim, Intersect, Remove and Remove Lump commands to bodies already associated to other bodies. However, if you copy and paste the result of such operations elsewhere in the tree you can then use these commands.
 

Cavities

Remove Lump allows you to delete cavities, which is a good way to control the quality of the part. As shown in the example below, the initial part includes a cavity resulting from a shell operation.
 
 

Applying Remove Lump and selecting the face to be kept...
 
 

reshapes the part. The application has removed the faces that are not adjacent to the selected face.
 
 

Interrupting Boolean Operations Computations

In case you made a mistake when performing a Boolean operation, you can interrupt the feature computation launched after clicking OK, when the computation requires a few seconds to perform.
In concrete terms, if the computation exceeds a certain amount of time, a window appears providing a Cancel option. To interrupt the operation, just click that Cancel button. This interrupts the process and then displays an Update Diagnosis dialog box enabling you to edit, deactivate, isolate or even delete the Boolean operation in progress.

This capability is available for any types of Boolean operations you are creating or editing.