Handy Dandy Slot Tool

You may have noticed the handy dandiness of the slot tool. It is super easy to use and provides a quick solution to creating those straight and arc shaped slots in the sketching environment. While its effectiveness in getting the sketch geometry into your sketch is fantastic, it can still be a little cumbersome to get it locked into place with relationships. For example, have you ever tried to make the center-points of the ending arcs horizontal in an arced slot? ARGH! The relationships simply are not in the property manager. It even makes the entire slot geometry its own entity which makes individual pieces of the slot un-selectable. DOUBLE ARGH!
I must admit, the first time that this happened to me I was in a time crunch, quickly deleted the slot, and I immediately went back to the old-school method of sketching the centerline of the slot and then using the ‘Offset Entities’ tool with the ‘cap ends with arcs’ option on. The good news is you can relax. This rash, resistant to change behavior is not necessary. By simply right clicking your slot geometry, you can choose to, ‘Explode Slot’. This will essentially dissolve the slot as a single entity and will actually infer any relationships such as tangencies, midpoint, and equal relationships…just as if you sketched it yourself free-hand. AWESOME! The ‘Slot Tool’ is back to being the perfect solution to all your arc and straight slot needs.