Building Wall Support Patterns with Custom Planks and Assembly Mates in SOLIDWORKS

In this video, we're going to add the planks that make up the support structure patterns for each of our walls. Now, in the last video,  we were adding the footers to each of our walls. We noticed a little situation here where we reused a footer that has worked on all of our walls,  the narrow board width,  but for this particular condition, the window,  because of the thickness of the window itself,  it's lining up just a little bit shallow of that surface.

So I've decided as the designer that I'm going to switch to a wide board to accomplish that. And let's go ahead and do that now. So the first thing we're going to do,  let's open up our master model.

Here we go. And I want to create a wide board that lives right here and extends the entire length of this panel. So let's do that right now.

We'll start a sketch on this surface here. All right, let's find the center of that beam because we want our board to live on the center. Grab a center rectangle, pull it out,  set the height at our global variable of board thickness.

And then the width is going to be the global variable of the wide board width. All right, let's bring this all the way down. Now, let's go ahead and do a boss extrude all the way up to this vertex.

Uncheck merge result and close it out. Just for consistency,  let's go ahead and give this the same color as the rest of our pieces. Oh, and we'll make sure the bodies is selected.

There we go. Now save your master model. Okay, once you've done that.

Close out your master model. It's going to tell you made a change that affects other parts and other assemblies. Do you want to move forward with those changes now? Select yes.

This is something that will happen in your design process. You'll move into the assembly phase and realize you want to actually make some adjustments and maybe add some pieces or delete some pieces. So this is how that looks.

Okay, let's go ahead. There we go. Now we don't need this anymore.

So I'm going to delete this out of our SA004. Make sure that you're in SA004 deck and frame. Save your work.

Let's create that new part. There we go. We'll go to file, new part.

Close out the sketch. Insert, we're going to insert our master file yet again. There we go.

All right. Delete, keep body. Keep this new wide board width that we created.

Let's save this. What should we call this? Let's call this, let's call this wall 009. Beautiful.

All right, save it. Go ahead and leave it open. You can minimize it with this little line box here.

Expand your sub-assembly box. Now insert components. Wall 009 should already be available.

Click the green check mark. And there it is. We've gone back into our master model,  created a new part and loaded that part into our assembly,  having seen how everything is stacking together.

Beautiful. Let's go ahead and save this. And let's go ahead and move forward.

All right. Now, I'm going to click this eyeball to get rid of this unnecessary clutter. Let's start adding those support panels.

Now, these same footer boards are going to be flipped 90 degrees and stacked on top of each other,  five on the bottom and six on the top row to create support boards that we can basically use a nail gun to nail our panels against. So let's do that now. I'll grab this deck 007, drag it out.

Let's set a coincident mate between these two surfaces and maybe this surface and this surface. Close it out. And then how about this surface and this surface? Perfect.

Close that out. All right. Let's leave that particular wall alone for right now.

Let's continue the process with each of our walls. All right. Let's find deck 009.

Coincident mate between that surface and that surface. Remember, these boards are going to fit between two planks. They're going to be completely covered.

So let's get these patterns in before we start adding the other planks because it's going to make it hard for us to see otherwise. Let's go ahead and set this surface coincident to this surface. Perfect.

Let's do the same thing over here. This happens to be deck 010. We'll drag that in.

Set this long surface against this inside surface of our plank. Make sure they are facing each other. We'll set that bottom surface onto this top surface of that footer.

And then set this surface against this surface. Perfect. Let's do the same thing above.

Close this out. This should be deck 010 again, and it is. We'll bring that up.

Do the same thing we did before. Go ahead and create the mate that sets that board in place. These are all coincident mates.

All right. Once you're satisfied, close it out. Continue to save your work periodically.

Let's leave the slide alone for right now because we've got some special conditions happening here. We don't want a board to get in the way of that. And we'll go ahead and leave the window alone too because it doesn't look like that's what we're actually creating for this particular wall panel.

So let's begin patterning some of these support structures and then come back to the unique walls. Let's start with this top panel here. If I were to go to linear component pattern,  and as always, select the thing being patterned first,  then set a direction.

We can do spacing and instances. There you go. It looks like it's patterning the wrong direction too.

That's one way to go,  but we as designers like to use references. Over dimensions, wherever possible. So let's pattern up to reference.

The reference will be tucked right up against this inside surface. And then the piece of that,  the aspect of that plank that's going to touch that inside surface will be our selected reference. So let's hit that top surface of the plank.

We have to click outside of it perhaps to see it populate, perhaps not. Let's set the number of instances to six and then close it out and see how it looks. All right, that's pretty good.

I'm just going to make sure that I'm in inches, pounds, and seconds. There we go. Let's go ahead and save our work.

Let's grab another one of these panels and place on the opposite side of these support boards. This is wall 004. All right, let's begin the mating process of this plank to where it needs to be.

Oh, there we go. Hold shift, select those two surfaces,  start a coincident mate. Let's grab this surface and this surface, great.

This surface and this surface, perfect. We have one wall fully complete. Beautiful.

Let's see if we can do the window panel next. I'm going to go ahead, move some items out of the way. I'm just going to hide that outside component and that's okay for right now.

Now we don't need to bring this particular board in and create new mating patterns if we can just create mirror patterns and save ourselves some time. So let's create a new plane. We'll do a mid plane using these two surfaces, great.

While that's still highlighted,  we'll mirror the component of that board. We'll see how that turned out. I'm just going to highlight this surface and do a quick section view to see how these turned out.

All right, it's looking the way that it should, great. Both boards are hugging that window panel,  which is what we want to do. Let's create another plane.

Mid plane between that surface and this surface,  cutting right down the middle of our window. And we'll use that as a pattern plane or a mirror plane rather. Grabbing, there we go, delete that.

Might as well delete both of these to make sure we get the right one. Let's get this plank and this plank. Here we go.

And just like before, I'm going to use section view just to get a look and make sure that they're hugging the window correctly and they are, great. Let's go ahead and save our work. Now we did hide a body earlier.

And we can find where that body is by going into our feature manager,  highlight it, show components, great. Let's bring another one of those in because it's going to go on the opposite side and start the mating process of where it goes. We're going to use this outside board for the coincident mate.

There we go. All right, this bottom surface is going to mate to this footer. Good.

I'm going to drag this out just a little bit so I can see this surface. And let's place this where it needs to be. Good.

Close that out. Save your work. That was the first of our unique walls.

Before we move on to the slide wall,  let's actually go back and readdress what's happening down here. Now, there are two walls that haven't already been started. And that's the one that goes in this space and the one that goes in this space.

But the pieces that make those walls have already been established in this assembly. So perhaps we can use some mirror patterns to bring some of those pieces to the other side. So the first thing is,  I want to bring these three pieces over to this wall space here.

So let's create a plane about which we can mirror. And actually, we already should have one. We used it for this window.

Let's go and find that. Here we go. SOLIDWORKS is a resource-intensive program.

Anytime where we can reuse information instead of creating it all over again,  that is a good thing to do. Let's use that plane to do a mirror component feature. We'll select these three.

All right, that worked out great. Let's go ahead and save our work. Now I want to bring, let's see,  these three new pieces over to this wall space here.

Let's bring them over to this space as well. For that, we will create a brand new plane. It'll be a mid-plane as we've been using.

It bisects this beam. With that highlighted, go to Mirror Components,  select the footer, select the panel,  select the first instance of that support plank pattern,  and watch it populate. Okay, so far, so good.

Let's go ahead and save our work. Now, we've got the first instance of all the patterns that make up each of these walls. Let's pattern all of these boards at the exact same time,  make our life easier.

We'll go to Linear Component Pattern. First, grab the components. It'll be this board, this board, this board,  this board, and this board.

Set the direction of that pattern. Go ahead and set the proper direction. As before, we'll pattern up to reference.

We'll be patterning, tucking up against our deck,  and the selected reference that we're going to use will be the top surface of one of these boards. So let's grab the top surface of this board here. Let's set our instances to five.

Perfect. All right, our pattern has populated in all of those walls. Let's go ahead and save our work.

Now, all we need to do is just cap the other side of these walls with the appropriate plank. So let's grab this plank first, wall 001,  and create our coincident mates to set these guys in place. Bring this up so I can see the surface.

Here we go. That one right there,  right down against the top of this footer. All right, that wall is done.

All right, close this out. Wall 002, we'll bring that in. That surface is going to mate to the surface of one of these boards.

This surface is going to mate up against the inside surface of this beam. And then the bottom surface of that plank is going to mate to the top surface of that footer. Close it out.

Save that work. All right. Now, just like before,  we can probably just bring in one of these panels and then mirror it to the other side.

So let's do that first. All right, let's grab that surface and maybe the inside surface of that narrow board there. Let's set its height above the floor by mating the bottom surface of the plank with the top surface of the footer.

I'm just going to go ahead and move this along so I can see this tiny side surface here. I'm going to hold shift,  select the surface I want it to mate to, select mate. All right, it established a great coincident mate.

Perfect. Close that out. Let's use that plane we created just to create a mirror.

And that would have been plane number four. All right, mirror components. Just grab that.

Here we go. Make sure you're grabbing the right item. There we go.

Perfect. Save your work. All right, we have one more wall to create down here.

This is going to use wall 003. Let's start mating some surfaces. All right.

Set the height of this above the floor by getting that tiny surface there,  mating it against the top surface of that board. Then this surface is going to mate to this surface. Great.

Let's go ahead and save our work. All right, the walls are looking pretty good. Now, we still have to complete the walls that surround our slide.

But for that, I think it's better that we go into the general assembly first because we're going to want that slide context there available for us so we can get it just right. So why don't we close out this video for right now. Go ahead and save your work one more time.

All right, in the next video,  we are going to go ahead and start that general assembly and use that general assembly to finish this wall here.