How to Show Part Knurling in SOLIDWORKS – Part 3

SOLIDWORKS Knurling appearance can be added on a per face basis as shown in part 2 of my SOLIDWORKS Knurling series. The knurling appearance was applied along the entire cylindrical face until the radii starts a new face. What if you don’t want the appearance to be on the entire face?

We will need to break these faces apart.

I am using my favorite sketch rectangle command, Center Rectangle with midpoints selected. This allows me to start from the origin and branch out. I made the top and bottom lines coincident to the cylindrical edges, making them construction lines. Then, just adding in a dimension for how long I want the appearance to be.

Starting a new sketch on a mid-plane

Using SOLIDWORKS Split Line

To separate the face we need to use a command called Split Line, which is located in Features and within the Curves dropdown.

Split Line

The type of split we want to do is Projection. In the pink selection area we are going to choose the sketch and the blue selection area we select the face.

Drag and drop an appearance onto the face.

To ramp this up another level, the initial sketch for the Split Line can be modified to include more faces to split.

Sketch mirror works well here.

The same Split Line command can also be modified to add more faces.

Additional Split Lines

Drag and Drop Appearance

After dialing in the appearance to our liking we can go to the appearance “beach ball” in the Design Tree area and while holding the ctrl key, we can drag and drop our knurling appearance onto the other split faces.

Appearance Applied

This doesn’t have to be knurling specific, this method can be applied to any appearance and Split Line command.

Want to learn more?

Attend our live online SOLIDWORKS Advanced Part Modeling training course to learn more part techniques.