I have a partial cylinder on which I want a counter-bored hole which is then patterned 3x in the longitudinal direction and 2x laterally.
The holes are not radial to the cylindrical surface.

I have tried creating one hole and then patterning.
The longitudinal pattern is OK but when I do the lateral pattern the counter-bore does not cut the curved surface.
I then created a seperate solid and patterned that OK so that I could do a combine to remove the material that way.
However, when I do the combine I can't get it to do all 6 holes - it will do either of the longitudinal patterns, but not both.

Am I patterning them correctly and am I tring to do the combine correctly?

 Hello Terry,

I think I have replicated what you are describing.  I'll step through it:

1. I start with a non-radial counter-bored hole on a cylinder.

2. I pattern the hole longitudinally (I used a count of 4).

3. I suspect this is the part that you are getting tripped up on.  Next, I select ALL of my pattern members and then pattern them laterally.

As you can see, I now have eight counter-bored holes in a 2D array on my cylinder.  Another thing to watch out for, make sure you select the entire hole before patterning it (try using the Right Click > Select > Depression option).  If you miss a face while patterning you could see the behavior you described of not cutting the solid.

Your approach using patterned solids is a nice workaround.  If you are using SpaceClaim 2009 then the combine operation should be applied to all of your pattern members; if this is not the case, please send an example to our support email so we can fix the behavior.  One thing to note, the holes produced by cutting away these patterned solids will not maintain the pattern relation.

I hope this helps,

James Saunders

Thanks James, I think I've got that now.

I'm struggling with moving, copying and patterning a little as it's a totally different way of doing them. I don't always get all of the surfaces, or sometimes I get too many. I also sometimes lose control of the dimensions, and which feature is going to move and which remain in position.

Now that I have the pattern, can I use it to associatively pattern the screws that fit in these holes, or do I just create patterns of those parts in the assembly?