Creating Section Views of Fan Impellers using Solidworks

The parametric capabilities of Solidworks creates many capabilities to re-use parts and assemblies by just changing some dimensions in the parts or assembly sketches. One of the things that is tricky though it to create section views will properly section a scaled drawing.

When creating a section view, the user is asked to draw a line for the section. If the part or assembly is scaled larger then the original line, then the section view is not cutting through the entire section. This can cause errors in the section view meaning that the whole section view has to be re-created.

To ensure that the line defining the section view scales correctly with scaling changes of the part, the section view line has to have relationships with the geometry of the part or assembly. For fan impeller drawings, the best way I found to do this was to snap onto the quadrants of the outside diameter of the impeller when making the line.


Thus the line is defined as going from the top quadrant down to the bottom quadrant. As the impeller is scaled, the line defining the section view is scaled and the section view is maintained.