Freecad countersink holes wrong way

Hey guys,

So I’m now slowly advancing through my project and I’ve hit a stumbling block that I can’t figure out after endless amounts of googling.

Everytime I create a hole in my project, the sketcher is drawing it on the bottom of the piece instead of the top, which is all fine and dandy, until I go to countersink my drill holes, the countersink is the wrong way and no matter what I do I can’t reverse this.

Hitting the reverse check box removes the drill holes entirely and leaves a drawn circle down the bottom of the piece.

There’s something way more techincal going on because all guides and tutorials I’ve looked at everyone is able to draw their circle on the top and drill through as you would - https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Creating…ith_PartDesign and I can’t and it’s driving me bloody insane!

Attached is my project as is.

Freecad details:
OS: Windows 10 (10.0)
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.19.23546 (Git)
Build type: Release
Branch: master
Hash: 6b017f9a16b15b0e628c8d874c4058442dee5548
Python version: 3.8.6
Qt version: 5.12.5
Coin version: 4.0.0
OCC version: 7.4.0
Locale: English/Australia (en_AU)

Edit: I can’t upload the freecad file directly - don’t know if anyone can help with this based on photo’s alone but I’ll upload some shortly.

Photos attached

So I found how to open up the report view, deleted the holes and tried again, now it won’t let me re-create them at all! everytime I try to draw them looking from the top down (or anywhere else for that matter), it says links go outside the allowed scope. I don’t understand why this is happening.

It looks like you edited/applied the sketch from the wrong side. If you see just circles in FreeCAD, when there should be a pocket, then you drilled the holes into the wrong direction.

In this case up into the air. I never used the “hole” tool, but use pocket and camfer for this, but there is a little checkmark called “reverse”. I guess this will flip the hole creation process into the opposite direction.

Also make sure the plain you edit on is from the coords of your object or a face of your object. These out of scope errors usually appear, when you e.g. select a plain from the global coord system and try to create a sketch for your body on it. If you are unsure select nothing and then click on new sketch. It will ask for a plain, which works. The error usually has nothing to do with your hole, unless you used external references the wrong way.

Your right, I remade the entire model and padded it in the reverse direction to get it below the plane line, once it was below that it was happy.

Why does FreeCad only work like this? to me the plane line is the bottom of the 3D printer bed, so building your item below that seems retarded… lol

CAD is about a 3D model in 3D space. There is no up or down and for sure there is no build plate.

In fact often it is easier to model around the center of origin as you can use the symmetry features in all directions using the predefined axis, when needed.

Yeah I’ve figured that out after making my model from scratch 4 or 5 times now, it makes life so much easier because you can then ensure things like countersunk drill holes are central and in the right place.

I still find it odd that for the model to do what you want it has to be below that plane line, to me that’s illogical. lol