About Join Features

Define Join Features

Join connects two bodies with screws as the joining elements.

Within each of the joined bodies, the necessary shapes to accommodate the screws are created. For each body that is being connected, Join creates a join feature. With two bodies, two join features (representing a join head and a join thread) are created: one for each connected body (similar to the lip feature).

During the join definition, it is not necessary to specify both of these bodies. However once the join has been defined, it is not possible to change the bodies that the features were placed in.

One of the join features is created in the active body. When this body is one half of a divided body that is in the document, then both the join head and the join thread features are created automatically. When instead the other half of the divided body is missing (either deleted or not created) or the active body is not the result of a division, then only the join head or thread is created. During the initial creation of the join features, different non-active bodies may be specified as the body to connect the active one to.

Similarly to the lip feature each of the two individual join features has a separate life cycle. Therefore it is possible to delete the join feature from each joined body separately.

About Outside Joins

You can create a join feature externally outside of the joining bodies. For the outside joins the guide height should be set to zero. If the guide height is not set to zero, the guide will be added to the inside geometry but not the outside geometry. If gussets are activated, they also create inside geometry only.