This article outlines the steps necessary to create your first sub-assembly in a CAD program, discussing how to select pre-existing parts or assemblies and place them into a new assembly. It explains how to set pieces in space, save your work, and prepare for the creation of more complex sub-assemblies.
Key Insights
- The article provides a guide to creating a new assembly in a CAD program, which involves selecting 'Assembly' instead of 'Part' from a menu, and then choosing the parts or assemblies to be included.
- When creating a sub-assembly, the article recommends naming it with an 'SA', a number, and a short description of the sub-assembly. This process involves inserting parts into part files and setting them in the exact space required.
- The CAD interface for an assembly is similar to a part file, but with some differences, such as the 'Feature Manager' showing parts instead of features. The assembly tools allow for setting pieces in space, inserting components, moving components, and making patterns or mirrors from them.
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In this lesson, we are going to create our very first sub-assembly. So, while in this main menu, go up to File, New, and instead of selecting Part, make sure that Assembly is selected. Go ahead and click OK.
All right, now it's immediately asking us, since we're opening an assembly, what parts or other assemblies do you want to start putting into this new assembly? For this case, let's go ahead and select Slide001 as our first part. Just like before, we have the ability to place it arbitrarily in space. If we go ahead and click the green checkmark, it'll set us in our exact space we want to be, just like we did with inserting parts into part files.
Since we've done this already, let's go ahead and save our work. I'm going to do a Control-Shift-Save As, and you can see there's no other assemblies in this folder, because this is the first one that we're making. For our sub-assemblies, I like to start the name with SA, and then give it a number, and then do underscore, and then describe the sub-assembly briefly.
We'll call this Slide. Beautiful. But there are two pieces to the slide, not just one.
Let's go ahead and insert that next piece. Now, you can see from your interface that it looks similar to a part file. It's got the Feature Manager, it's got the Command Manager, tabs to the right, a lot of the same types of tools here at the very top.
But there are some subtle differences. The first is, here in the Feature Manager, it's showing you parts. Sub-assemblies, or assembly parts rather, don't really have a lot of particular unique features that you can create.
In other words, you're not necessarily designing pieces and building pieces for the first time in assemblies. You're just grouping them together in certain ways. You probably won't see a lot of extruded cuts, or extruded bosses, or sweeps.
You're going to see more part files, assembly files, and so on and so forth. At the very top, in our basic assembly tools, we have features that set pieces in space. There's this Insert Components feature that allows us to bring files in for the first time.
We can move components, we can make patterns from them, we can mirror them. But we're not going to see a lot of, again, cut extrude, boss extrude, because that's not really what assemblies are for. All the design work and building work, again, is done in the part file.
Assemblies are just where we group everything. Again, let's complete this group of slide pieces by importing the other slide piece that we're missing. In order to do that, we'll go to Basic Assembly Tools, and go to Insert Components, just click the tool.
Just like before, it's bringing us up to a file folder. Navigate to the file folder that has your parts, if you don't already see it here. I'm going to select slide 002 and click Open.
Just like before, it's asking me where in arbitrary space I want to place this thing. But I'm going to go ahead and click the green check mark, so it appears exactly where it was designed when we first made it in our master part. There are other ways to place pieces in space, and we're going to learn about that in subsequent videos.
Let's go ahead and save this work. And that's it for this video. In the next video, we're going to create our sub-assembly that features all of our mainframe beam structural pieces.
