PartDesign Bearingholder Tutorial II



This is an introductory tutorial to modeling with the PartDesign workbench in FreeCAD. The purposes of the tutorial are to introduce you to two different workflows for creating a cast part with drafts and fillets. Depending on what other CAD programs you have been using, one or the other might be familiar to you. As a working example we will be modeling a simple bearing holder.

This is the second part of the tutorial. It will use what might be called the 'multiple body' workflow, using the (simpler) top part of the holder as an example.

Obviously, to follow through this tutorial you must activate the PartDesign workbench.

Design data
The holder should be able to hold a diameter 90mm bearing with a width of up to 33mm (e.g. DIN 630 type 2308). The bearing requires a shoulder height of at least 4.5mm in the holder (and on the shaft). The top part of the holder will be bolted to the bottom with two 12mm bolts. There should be a groove on both sides of the bearing able to hold a standard shaft sealing ring DIN 3760: 38x55x7 or 40x55x7 on one side, 50x68x8 on the other side.

The holder will be a sand cast with a minimum wall thickness of 5mm, a draft angle of 2 degrees, and a minimum fillet radius of 3mm.

Setting up the skeleton geometry
Create a new part in the PartDesign workbench. Rename the Body that is created by default to Skeleton. This Body is probably activated already, which you can see by the blue background colour in the feature tree. Create a new sketch on the YZ plane.