Creating a 3D Sketch Wire for a Swing Seat Using SOLIDWORKS Swept Boss Base and Reference Geometry

In this video, we're going to create the wire that holds our swing seat. I'm going to be using these dimensions as a reference, you can just go ahead and follow along with the video. In doing so, we're going to use swept boss base feature for the first time as well as 3D sketch.

All right, zooming into our seat, we want our wire to travel inside this cylinder,  exit, bend up, bend back, and stop halfway. All right, now the first thing we would normally do is try to create a plane for that wire to live on. But there isn't really a clean set of references to create that plane, I'd have to probably create a sketch first.

And that seems like a lot of extra steps. There is a faster way to do it, and that's by using 3D sketch. Now, the thing that makes 3D sketch unique as opposed to just a regular sketch is it doesn't require a plane or a flat surface to be built, you can just start building it.

So let's do that now. We'll go to sketch this drop down menu and go to 3D sketch. Now, if I say grab a line and start placing lines throughout the space, without a plane or any kind of reference, SOLIDWORKS is just placing them in arbitrary locations in XYZ space.

Well, that really doesn't help us very much. I'm gonna go ahead and highlight this and delete it. We are going to be depending a lot on references and converted entities of pieces around us to define exactly where that sketch is going to live.

So the first thing we're going to do is convert some entities to really place that sketch. We'll go to convert entities, maybe select this circle here, scroll around, select this outside circle, close it out. I'm going to click and drag to connect these circles.

We don't need them so I'm going to highlight them and create for construction. Then I want to find the midpoint between these two circles. I'll grab my center line.

And now that I have these converted entities,  I can use them as references to place an exact sketch in space. And right here, it's trying to establish a vertical relationship in that line, which is calling XY. That works.

All right. Now we have an exact center of this inside cylinder and this is where our wire is going to begin. So let's grab this outside line and start on this midpoint here.

Now again, there's really no directionality to this line whatsoever. So let's establish a coincident relationship to this center line here, just so we know that it's collinear. We'll grab this blue dot and just drag it out.

Perfect. Next, we'll grab that line tool one more time, create that first bend and that second bend, which is going to connect with the top of this center line here. These are still arbitrarily placed in 3D space.

So let's start defining them now. The first thing I want to do is create a parallel relationship between this top line and this bottom line. That's like we're saying we want these two lines to live on the same plane.

Perfect. And that's automatically going to place this bend line on the same plane as well. So it killed two birds with one stone,  which is great.

Let's start giving it some dimensions. We'll go to smart dimension and we'll set the center line to four. Why don't we set this top line to an inch and let's dimension, not this entire line, but rather the distance between the distance between this corner and this circle center here.

So I'll grab that point and this point and we'll set that to an inch as well. All right. The sketch is fully defined.

All we're missing are some bends, so this wire can look realistic. We'll go to sketch fillet, select the two corners that need to have bends within them. All right.

That looks pretty good. Set the dimension. In this case, I'm going to have mine at half an inch.

Close it out with a green check mark. And that's that. Let's close out the check.

Let's close out the sketch and save our work. So this is essentially the wire that's going to hold our seat. But as you can see,  it's not a feature.

It's just a sketch right now. So what we can do is we can go to features. And go to swept boss base.

And what this is, it's a special type of boss that follows a pathway throughout 3D space. And it usually requires two things. The first is the pathway itself.

And the second is a profile that's extruded along that path. And that could be a triangle,  a circle, a square, or perhaps some random shape that we sketched out. In this case,  it's going to be the circle because our wire has a circular profile.

And instead of drawing the path by hand, we can simply go to circular profile over here to the left. Click that. And then it'll automatically give us a circular profile to whatever path we select.

Now we just need to select the path itself. That's what this box is for. We'll highlight it.

Select our 3D sketch. And you can see it's beginning to build our wire for us. Now, it's a little thin.

So I'm going to go ahead and increase the diameter to, say, 0.5, half an inch. It's a very thick wire. But then again, that inside cylinder where it lives is also pretty wide.

For right now, let's go ahead and finish this out. We'll go to options, uncheck merge result, and then close it out with a green check mark. Let's save our work.

Now that we've created the seat and the wire, let's go ahead and adjust some dimensions so they seem a little bit more realistic. For instance, I want this wire to be about a quarter inch diameter. I think that's actually appropriate.

Or better yet,  three-eighths. We'll go back to Sweat Boss Base, edit feature. And instead of a half inch,  we're going to do 3-8.

There we go. Now that means this inside cylinder of our seat should probably shrink as well. So let's make that change.

We'll go into the sketch. And let's reduce this to half of three-eighths. So three-sixteenths rather.

I'm going to do that simply by just pushing dash 2, hitting enter. And just make sure that your dimension equates to 0.1875. All right, because it's defining the radius. That's half of what three-eighths is going to be.

Let's close out the sketch and take a look at our finished product. All right, we have a wire that fits neatly inside of this seat. And later down the line, we'll use one of these surfaces to mirror the wire and basically create it so it has two sides instead of just this one.

But for right now, let's save our work. And since we have a new body, we will color it green. Save again.

And that's it for this video. In the next video, we will begin to make the chain links for our swing set.