Hi Leonard, so your profile for your sweep is quite small in size, you may want to scale all this stuff up by 10 times so that you are not working on sweeping such a small object that is getting close to the 0.001 fitting tolerance.

But that does not seem to actually be the main cause of your problem - it seems that your threads you created actually runs into itself:



The booleans cannot process objects that have pieces of their surfaces running into themselves, I think you need to have some more space there so that you don't create that kind of self-intersecting object in order for the booleans to work properly.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

The screw is one of two set screws on the front of a Bauhaus clock that hold the faceplate. I thought its size might be contributing to the rough edges. That said, typically set screws are about this size.

If you have not looked, I included in the file the thread profile and helix used as well as the center core.

I can eliminate the threaded section and be careful with close ups in that area.

Thanks.

Leonard

Hi Leonard, I think we may have posted those last messages at the same time, so you may not have seen my other reply above where it seems that your thread object is self-intersecting which will tend to cause problems with booleans.

I'll try to make slightly different version to show you what I mean.

- Michael

I just received your update.

That is interesting. When I created the thread profile I made it so the legs extended half way between the helix cycle so there would not be a gap. I will cut the profile legs back a bit. I will also scale up.

Thanks.

L.

Hi Leonard, check out the attached model - it should now boolean for you properly and give you a clean cut.

I scaled it up by 10 times in size - you can scale it down again if you need to have the final model smaller, but really the key thing is that when I created the sweep I made sure it did not run over top of itself and had some clearance here:



- Michael

Hi Leonard,

> When I created the thread profile I made it so the legs
> extended half way between the helix cycle so there would
> not be a gap.

That could be good if it was like 2 separate objects that were meeting up and then would be joined together.

But having a closed object kind of skim along its own self like that creates ambiguity in the intersection calculations.

- Michael

I enlarged everything 10X and adjusted the profile and presto!

Edit: Added pic of the clock. You can see the two screws on the front. The width is 8"+.

Thanks for the help, Michael.

L.