How a Jogged Cutting Line can affect your section view

There may be times when you wish to show sections of your model at differing depths in the same section view. Solidworks thankfully allows you to create your own custom section view cutting lines, so you can easily create jogged section views that can show differing section depths at a moment’s notice.

Ordinarily, a section view should align itself with the parent view's top and bottom limits. However, if you've ever noticed a mismatch in your section and parent views' alignment, you may have made a common mistake in your cutting line's sketch.

Let’s take a look at a normal, regular section view versus a section view that’s showing too much material:

We can see that the jogged section view IS showing the model at different depths and starting points, but for some reason, our section view is showing too much material (as evidence by the fact that the section view’s top and bottom limits don’t line up with the top and bottom edges of the model itself).

What’s actually happening is that Solidworks is looking both to the left (in the direction designated by the section view) and ALSO downwards at the jog. We can visualize this by observing the following diagram:

To investigate, let’s take a look at the actual cutting line by editing its sketch:

As we look at the cutting line, we can see that the line’s jog is actually made of a solid line:

This is problematic because the way Solidworks decides what material to show and what to cut away is dependent on the cutting line’s construction and non-construction geometry. When the cutting line and its jog are set to non-construction geometry, Solidworks’ understanding is that we want to see everything perpendicular to EACH line entity regardless of the direction we choose.

The way to fix this then is to simply make the jog a construction line:

From here, we can see the correct section view appear:

The upper and lower limits of the section view line up correctly with the top and bottom edges of the main model and we can see that the depth transition in the section view correctly occurs at the jog.

You can find some more information on this kind of behavior using the Solidworks help page here: Creating Manual Section Views

If you’re still having trouble getting your section view to show the correct amount of material, feel free to call Hawk Ridge Systems Technical Support at 877.266.4469 (US) or 866.587.6803 (Canada) or you can email us at support@hawkridgesys.com.