you see here check us out at solidwize.com where we have hundreds of SolidWorks

tutorials to help you guys learn SolidWorks

today i wanna talk about contour selection

if you right-click in on your mouse and come down to the bottom here

there's an option called contour select tool

and when you're inside an extrusion you also have a box at the bottom for

selected contours so there's a little bit of a debate on

how much information they should be putting inside a sketch some say that

you should keep your sketch very simple and some say should try to put as much

information to a single sketch as possible

we have two sketches here to start

one is simply the base for this part and we create features and sketches

after the fact and the second here has all of our

contours in a single sketch and in the features are built from that

single sketch so i tend to prefer this method

and i would say use this method as long as your sketch doesn't get too

difficult to manage and so if you get to the point where a

single change to one part of the sketch starting to ruin the rest of sketch that's

when you typically know that you have too many

items in a single sketch but for example if you're taking the

SolidWorks certified professional exam you want to use

a single sketch as it significantly faster for producing

the part that you tried to create so I'm gonna go back in and

remake both of these parts or both of these bodies

and i'll go ahead and delete out the features

to do that

so to start i'll go ahead and build off of the sketch on the right

and in this method i've created the entire body first

or the piece of stock that I'd be using

and then i create a sketch on this space to remove out material

and then I created another sketch on the top face

another circle

and then created another cut and lastly i create the slots profile on

the top base and then cut through the part

now on the other side with everything in the same sketch

with me that come in an extrusion start using contours

or we can right click in the and choose that contour select tool

in this case by choosing outside ring and then

this portion of the part is coming to an extrusion

or simply use the instant 3D to drag this out

to consider if you're also combining this with the instant 3D SolidWorks

that this will be a lot faster of a way to create these features

but either method is valid like i said i tend to prefer the contour select method

as it allows you to put everything in one sketch

and manage everything from there typically in a more complex part

you'll use some combination of multiple contours

and then possibly add sketches to other faces at a later point to make

modifications keep in mind that you do have both of

these options available when creating your part