Translations:Engine Block Tutorial/46/en

Cutting Down the Excess Billet Material from the Block
Now that we have holes marked out for headbolts (we could do the same thing for oil channels, water jackets, etc) we will want to "trim" the outside of the block billet down to a more suitable shape. This will make the engine lighter, allow it to cool more easily, mean less steel must be used to cast the block. Like the bolt pattern we will be laying out a 2 dimensional drawing outlining the shape we want on the finished product. We could draw the spline curve directly with the mouse, or use the hybrid approach like we used for the circles where we used the mouse to find approximate coordinates and then typed in the true values we wanted. A more interesting approach is to use the 2D drafting's construction mode to plot a few guide shapes to help us trace out a nice, symmetric, spline curve by snapping to our constructed guide shapes.