You create a draft feature to remove perpendicularity between model surfaces and the

parting line (for molded parts). This is such a critical feature for many of the products we
design. At the end of this lesson, we will also see how to perform a draft check.

Before we begin, we need to define a few key terms.

DRAFT SURFACES

These are the model surfaces that draft will be applied to. They can be solid surfaces or
surfaces created as actual surface features. There are only two rules that are applied to draft
surfaces.

• They must be closed in on the top, sides and bottom. Therefore, you can not
extrude a single line as a surface, then expect to add draft to that surface, because
there is no top, side or bottom surfaces.

• Any tangency with adjacent surfaces may cause the draft to fail. For example,
suppose you have a rectangular block. You want to add draft to the front of the
block, but you already have a round at the top edge. This front surface can not be
used for draft.

DRAFT HINGES

These are planes, planar surfaces, datum curves or model edges that act as the axis of
rotation for the drafted surfaces. When defining the draft hinge as a plane or planar surface,
be aware of the distance from the surface being drafted, because it does affect it. When
defining curves or edges for the draft hinge, you must also supply another entity to define the
“Pull Direction” or the direction the part comes out of the mold.

The following figure shows the potential problem with choice of draft hinge when using planes
or planar surfaces.
 Looking at the figures above, there is a datum curve that shows the original surface that is
being selected as the Draft Surface. In the figure on the left, we use the top surface of the
model as the Draft Hinge. In the figure on the right, we use a datum plane above the model.

When the draft is calculated, it will project the draft surface up to the draft hinge, then apply
the angle at their intersection. We can see that the overall width of the top of the part on the
left is still the original length, but we’ve actually made the part bigger on the right.

DRAFT ANGLE

The draft angle is the dimension value applied to the surface. There is a maximum of 30
degrees that can be applied as a draft. If you need more than 30 degrees, you will need to
use a different modeling method, such as extrude, sweep, etc.

CREATING DRAFTS

The draft tool is located in the Feature Toolbar, in the top most grouping of blue icons, and
looks like the following.
To demonstrate the new draft tool, we will open up the model entitled Draft1.prt. It will
initially look like the following.

We are going to draft all of the vertical surfaces in this model. Therefore, we start by clicking
on the Draft icon in the Feature Toolbar. The dashboard (with the references panel open)
looks like the following.

When creating a draft feature, the first thing you specify are the surfaces to be drafted. This
is the top field in this References panel, and is activated by default. That is why it is not a
field at the bottom of the dashboard.

Therefore, we will select all of the surfaces (using the Ctrl key) that are shown in the next
figure.
Once all of these surfaces are selected, we need to click into the Draft Hinges field (either in
the References panel, or by picking the first field in the dashboard). With this field active, we
can pick a planar surface, datum plane, or chain of edges/curves to act as our draft hinge.

Therefore, using selecting techniques learned in lesson 3, we will pick the chain of tangent
edges that go around the top, as shown in the next figure.

Since we did not use a plane or planar surface as our draft hinge, we must pick a datum
plane or other planar surface in the model that is perpendicular to the pull direction. First,
however, we must pick in the Pull Direction field to activate it. Once activated, click on the
TOP datum plane in the model tree. At this time, all elements are defined, so we can see an
angle on our model for the draft, as shown in the following figure.
NOTE: If you don’t see the yellow arrow and angle dimension, you have not defined enough
references for this draft feature.

We can drag the handle for the angle dimension to dynamically see the draft preview update.
We want to make sure we are drafting outwards as we go down from the top of the model.
Once your draft is going in the right direction, enter 8.0 as the draft angle.

Our preview now looks like the following.

 Click on the green check mark to complete this first draft feature. The model will look like the
next figure.

Save this model for later, and then close it.

SPLIT