AutoCAD: Best practice: fill hole in solid, remove region from solid

[MichaelBrenden]

Got a "complex solid" (a flat piece of metal with hundreds of holes punched thru it - better known as perforated aluminum sheet).

 

Need to "fill in" some of those punched holes.

 

1. Is it best practice to draw a circle on top of metal sheet, centered on existing hole that needs to be filled in, then extrude that new circle, then UNION the sheet and resulting cylinder (resulting from the extrude of the circle) ?

 

This works, it does "fill in" the hole. But there appears to be something else that's also part of the solid, because after "filling in" the hole (with the cylinder) via UNION, the outline of a circle remains at one end of the "filled in" hole. That circle outline should not be there. It's not a "history" of the "complex" solid (did a BREP, turned off history). Is it a region, somehow included during object creation? What is the best way to get rid of this circle? EXPLODE'ing the "complex" solid results in a mess that is, apparently, a one-way ticket to surface-Hell, meaning the resulting bunch of surfaces can't easily be recombined into a solid.

[ReMark]

You can also remove a hole using the Move Faces command. Basically you're dragging the hole completely off the object.

[qball]

Could PressPull then Union.

Looks like Move Faces is quicker. Kinda hard to find, under Solid Editing, middle pull down

[JD Mather]

Simply solidedit delete face. This is trivially easy and will even heal a complex surface/hole intersection.