Adding Support Legs to a Curved Slide Using Centerlines, Sketch Tools, and the Draft Feature in CAD

In this video, we're going to add the legs that support our slide. So let's do that now. Let's start a sketch on the top plane.

And I want to add two legs,  one in this general space and one supporting this middle piece right here. And I want those legs to more or less live along the exact center of this slide curvature. Lucky for us, we already have a sketch that represents that, that we can convert.

If we go to our projected curve and find the top plane sketch, highlight it,  and click convert entities, we get that curve back in our sketch. Let's highlight it and make sure it's for construction only. All right, let's place this first leg here.

I'll grab the circle tool. Let's use the center circle,  place on that line and drag it out. Let's give it a diameter.

In this case,  we'll go for 10 inches. Now we need to decide where on this line it's going to live. I'd like it to live in the exact center.

So I'm going to highlight that line,  hold shift, highlight the center of that circle and select midpoint. Great. Now I want another leg in this general area, but I don't want to accidentally run it into one of these rings.

I want to see what's happening on the other side. So I don't do that. In order to do that, I'll go to display style, this drop down menu and go to hidden lines.

We can see exactly where those rings are. Great. All right.

Now,  let's go ahead and create a second circle here on this line. We'll highlight this circle,  highlight that circle and make them equal. Now, on this curve, we need to establish the more or less the center point.

So let's see if we can highlight this curve and hide the circle and find a midpoint. It's not offering that to us probably because it's made from a spline and it's a little more complicated than an arc tool. We can find our own way there in another method.

And if we use the center line, we can grab this side of the spline and this side of the spline, find the midpoint of that line and then drag it out perpendicularly, highlight that vertex,  highlight this arc, make them coincident. We now have more or less the center of this spline. Let's highlight that, hold shift, hide the center of the circle and merge them together.

And there we go. Your sketch should look something like that. All right.

Let's go ahead and bring our display style back to shaded with edges, close out the sketch and extrude these legs. In this case, we're going to extrude up to body, uncheck merge result,  and then close it out. Now, if I were to say isolate this piece, we can see that its top surface has a curvature that exactly matches that slide, which is kind of cool.

Let's exit isolate. Now let's add some feet to these legs. We'll start a sketch on the bottom of one of these legs and let's use offset entities, highlight the surface, make sure it's offsetting to the outside and we'll give it a two inch distance.

Let's do the same thing to the other leg. Great. Now let's extrude those up and we'll do this blind at three inches.

Make sure it's going the right direction and we'll uncheck merge result. Close it out. Now I want these feet to have a chamfered edge and we can do that by going to this fillet box, hitting this arrow and going to chamfer and selecting that edge, which would work perfectly fine.

We can even adjust the angle if we want to, but I'm going to use a new tool to do this so we can learn something new. In this case, it's going to be this draft feature here. Now, if you don't already have this,  go search for it in the search commands, click it and drag it onto your features tab,  but I'm going to go ahead and get started now.

Now the first thing with a draft feature is we have to establish what surface is going to get the angle and that's going to be faces to draft. So I'm going to highlight this box and highlight this cylinder. I want the angle to occur on that pink face, but we need to know, is it going to angle inward, outward? Is it going to angle towards the top, towards the bottom? We need to establish a neutral plane for it to draft against.

That's what this box is for. So let's select that and let's select this top surface here. Make sure that you're in manual and not draft expert and make sure that it says neutral plane here.

Let's set this draft angle to 10 degrees so we can really see that draft happen and then let's click show preview. All right, it's ghosting in what that feature is going to look like, but I don't want it to get any bigger on the bottom than the diameter of these feet that we currently have. So how do I change that? Well, I can change the neutral planes, the drafts inward instead of drafting the bottom surface outward.

So I'm going to right click, delete that and now select the bottom surface. Oh, it's drafting in the wrong direction. That's okay.

We'll just hit this directional arrow and there we go. It's now drafting in the right direction. Let's close that out.

There we go. That's what we want it to look like. Let's do the same thing over here so we can review it.

We'll go to the draft feature tool, faces to draft, the outside cylinder. For the neutral plane, we will select the bottom surface. Make sure that show preview is checked.

Make sure that we hit the directional arrow until we're drafting the right direction. Make sure it's set to 10 degrees and then close it out. Beautiful.

And that completes our legs. In the next lesson,  we're going to combine all the bodies that make up this half of the slide and we're going to finish our slide feature of this part.