Helical Sweep
Use Helical sweep to carry a section around an axis and along it at the same time. Select the region to sweep, press I, then pick the axis in the viewport. It is how you get a spring, a worm, an auger, or a screw thread modelled as real geometry rather than a thread feature.
What you set
| Field | What it means |
|---|---|
| Axis | A straight model edge, a reference axis, or a world axis. Proposed as Z |
| Pitch | How far the helix rises per turn, in millimetres |
| Turns | How many times round |
| Hand | Right or left, which way the spiral winds |
Total height is pitch × turns. There is no height field and no taper. The section is swept with its orientation locked to the axis rather than rolling with the curve, which is what keeps a spring's wire section upright all the way up.
Where the profile has to be
Put the section off the axis, on one side of it, on a plane parallel to it.
Off the axis. The section's centre cannot sit on the axis. The helix would have no radius to wind around, and the feature says so.
On one side of it. As with a revolve, a section that crosses the axis has no single solid to make. The same check runs, and the same English sentence comes back with "helix" in place of "revolve". It is not translated.
On a plane parallel to the axis. A profile plane perpendicular to the axis is not blocked, but it is untested. In that arrangement the axis-crossing check above is skipped as well, so keep the profile plane parallel to the axis.
What it will not do
A section with a hole is refused outright. The feature errors rather than dropping the hole quietly, and the sentence reads in English in every language:
Helical sweep does not support face-with-holes profiles in this release
Model the hollow as a separate cut, or sweep the solid section and bore it afterwards.
Pitch and turns have no upper limit. Nothing caps either field, so the number you type is the number that gets built. A helix is built as a chain of short edges, twenty-four per turn, so asking for thousands of turns asks for tens of thousands of edges, and the tab will tell you about it before the geometry does. Keep turns to what the part actually needs.