Solidworks has made creating threaded holes a breeze. Instead of cutting holes with an extruded cut feature, users can now easily create various types of holes with one feature: Hole Wizard.

To demonstrate some of the capabilities of the Hole wizard, we would be creating a simple cuboid and adding threaded holes on Solidworks.

Step 1: Start by drawing a rectangle on the Top plane with a length and width of 70mm and 50mm, respectively. Extrude the rectangle to 10mm, as shown below:

Step 2: On the Features tab, select the Hole wizard. You would notice that the Hole wizard’s property manager comes up. The Hole Wizard has two tabs; Type and Positions. The Type tab contains information about holes and their properties like depth and size, while the Positions tab helps position the centre of the hole we have selected.

In this example, we would be using the Straight tap (circled in red) under the Hole type. For now, leave all the other specifications, and let’s move to the positions tab.

Step 3: Select the top face of the cuboid. Usually, Solidworks should automatically change the part’s orientation to the top view. If not, click the spacebar and select the top view. Once you are in the top view, move your cursor towards the cuboid, and you will see yellow previews of the hole. Click to place the hole centre in four (4) places.

Add horizontal and vertical constraints and dimensions, as seen below. Ensure that all four hole centres are symmetrical about the horizontal and vertical midplane lines.

Step 4: Click the green tick to preview the holes. Then let us edit the Hole specifications. Depending on the application, you can adjust the hole’s depth (end conditions), flare angle, hole size, etc. For this example, select M8 x1.25 and set the end conditions to “Through all”.

Step 5: Now that we have created the holes, we can make the thread.

On the same Hole wizard feature, click the dropdown and select “Thread” (circled red), and its Property Manager will appear.

Step 6: With the Thread feature, we can define properties like the starting edge, number of thread revolutions, thread pitch, thread size, thread method, etc.

Set the type to be Metric die and the size as M10x1.0. Also, set the thread method as Extrude thread and click the green mark. You will see that the thread appears.

Step 7: To see the threaded hole better, you can section the cuboid.