----SOLVED----
Thank you to everybody for your assistance. I managed to get to where I wanted thanks to instructions provided by @dual_sport_dork
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Not sure if anyone can help me here. I am pretty lost and confused and wouldnāt mind if someone could ELI5 something for me.
Iāve never used a real CAD software before yesterday night and Iām struggling a bit, I tried googling things but itās just sending me deeper into a rabbit hole of things I do not understand yet.
Iām trying to make this speaker enclosure Iāve seen just to do something with this shitty bluetooth speaker I have, so I decided to recreate the enclosure myself.
Long story short, I realized I kinda screwed myself after disassembling the bluetooth speaker and now I need to make a 2mm deep pocket on top of the case to snap in the buttons module. I donāt really feel like starting the design again from scratch.
Anyway, as you can see in the attached image, I need to make a big round pocket on top, but both side panels are separate bodies so my pocket only goes through the main body and ignores the 2 other bodies.
I can think of other ways to achieve what I want but Iād really like to figure out a way to do it from where I am right now, if possible. Iāve seen the term shape binder and āunionā in my searches but I canāt quite figure it out.
Thank you to anyone who bothered reading this lol
EDIT: For anyone who might see this and is curious about how the enclosure is performing, I finished printing the main body and assembled it to test. Am still missing the side panels and I have to design some kind of flange cover for the driver but hereās what I got so far:
I donāt know about the right way to do this, but hereās what Iād do:
Go into the Draft workbench. Select the sketch for your pocket circle there, and create a Draft Clone of it, which is the blue sheep icon:
This is not the same as the orange sheep āPartdesign_Cloneā command found in the Part Design workbench. Donāt ask me why they use the same icon.
If this is the first time youāve used the Draft workbench, it will āhelpfullyā slap a grid on your X/Y axis. If you would like that out of your face, click the āToggle Gridā button, which may be in your overflow toolbar and has thus fallen off of the right edge of the screen:
Anyhow, this will create a linked clone of your sketch. Anything you do to the original will be reflected on the clone(s) if you have to adjust it later. Create two clones, since you need to apply this to two bodies. Drag one each onto the bodies for your side panels (their root icons are that blue stairstep logo). You can then use these to create a pocket or pad or whatever youāre going to do.
If your side panel bodies have their origin set to the same position as your baffle piece in the middle, you wonāt have to do anything else. Your cloned sketches will be in exactly the same location as the original. If you moved them relative to the document origin, you may have to scoot your cloned sketches around by fiddling with their coordinates in their Attachment properties.
I have no use for these instructions but wanted to say thank you for taking your time to do this. I have been in this type of situation countless times and would kill for a response like this. Thank you for being helpful and useful to someone in need.
Ohhhh I really appreciate you taking the time to write this. Iām gonna have to reread this a couple times for my slow brain to get it but I think I might be able to follow and get it to work.
Thank you so much! Iāll reply back either once Iāve figured it out or right before I blow my brains out!
This is not the same as the orange sheep āPartdesign_Cloneā command found in the Part Design workbench. Donāt ask me why they use the same icon.
Theyāre the same icon because theyāre both cloning operations ā and Iām sure weāre all familiar with the story of Dolly the sheep, the first cloned animal.
Theyāre blue and orange because those are the freecad colors for sketch and part respectively.
I get that, but from a design perspective itās confusing. Making the only difference between two operations that behave differently only color is also not great from an accessibility standpoint, either.
Okay so Iāve made 2 clones of the sketch from the Draft workbench and put one into each body but it still doesnāt seem to apply the pocket to the other bodies.
Not sure if I did something wrong. Create clones of sketch, place them inside each body container for the 2 side panels, switch back to Part Design workbench, select original sketch and then Pocket. Am I doing this right?
You only cloned the sketch into the other bodies. You still need to use these sketches in each body to create a pocket. So activate one of the side panels for editing (double clicking on the body in the list, so that the name is bold), then selecting the sketch clone and clicking the pocket symbol in the part design workbench. Set its depth and click ok. Repeat for the other side panel
You also have to do a pocket operation to each of the cloned sketches. They will not inherit the pocket from the original sketch ā they only inherit the dimensions of the original sketch itself. In the end you will have three total pocket operations, one each on each body.
Each operation applies only to the body it is attached to in the tree.
Omg that was actually so simple. I thought about that too but I never actually used the pocket button I would always just switch to the Tasks tab in Combo View, but for some reason that tab is empty when you select a cloned sketch so I thought that meant whatever I did to the original would just apply to the clones. The button works just fine though.
Thank you so much for your help!
