Split macro

[Monstrum Mathias]

Hi all.

I've been struggling with a library feature for some time now that can split 80mm, 120mm, 160mm, 200mm etc shapes in to 40mm thick bodies we feed to a router. They need to be precisely 40mm for the nesting program to work. While library features works like a charm for cutting and numbering our router parts, it's just impossible to work with for this splitting purpose, due to the features working on other bodies than intended and only "non boolean features" allowed. Does anyone have any experience with using macros for splitting? I can only see examples of splitting and saving to new parts but I need the bodies to stay in the document. Is macro the way to go you think?

[Dwight]

Maybe you could do this with an "Intersect" feature. To do that, you'd make a stack of blocks for every other layer then run Intersect. One does have to select which bodies to delete manually.

It would be nice if using the Combine feature with the "common" operation type had the option of not merging bodies. That could be closer to what you want.

It would also be nice if every cut operation had the option to retain all the bodies.

The Split feature always did seem to me to be a bad implementation. Why complicate it with part export? I don't understand what the check boxes mean; I just check them all and it seems to work.

Dwight

[AlexB]

I could see this working as a macro feature, but that is probably one of the more complex things to develop with the API.
My thought is that you could take the the starting face and the thickness as an input and it could copy/cut the body to create the desired features. This is certainly an interesting proposal.

[SPerman]

What about using an Extrude Cut, Thin Feature? I don't use library features, so I'm not sure if this is feasible or not.