Discover the meticulous process of creating a deck sub-assembly file by consolidating all the individual pieces, ensuring each fits perfectly in place. This detailed walk-through will guide you through every necessary step, including the saving and renaming of files as you progress.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates the step-by-step process of creating a deck sub-assembly file, which involves systematically gathering the outer and inner pieces of the deck and placing them in their correct positions.
- Throughout the process, it is crucial to save your work continually. Each time a new body is selected, the work should be saved under a new filename, following a logical sequence (Deck001, Deck002, etc.).
- After all the deck pieces have been assembled, they are loaded into an assembly to check against the master file. This is to ensure that all parts are included and correctly placed, creating a comprehensive deck and frame sub-assembly.
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In this video, we're going to gather all the pieces that make up our deck, and we're going to place them in a sub-assembly. Make sure you have your master file open, and let's go ahead and start a new part. If it prompts you in the middle of a sketch, go ahead and close out that sketch with the red X, and then go to Insert, Part, select your master file playground, and click the green check mark, placing it exactly where it needs to be.
Beautiful. All right, let's go to Delete Keyed Body, make sure Keyed Bodies is checked, and we'll just systematically go around in a circle gathering just the outside pieces first. Let's grab that deck piece first.
Once we have that, save this file under a name. We'll call it Deck001. Beautiful.
Once you've done that, save your work. Now, do another Save As, calling this Deck002. Then we go through, remove that body, and select this body to keep.
Save your work again. Save it under a new name, Deck003. Repeat the process, moving on to this body next.
Save your work. Make sure you save your work after you select a new body each time, and then start a new file, going to the next sequential file name. Right-click, right-click Delete, move on to this body.
Save your work. Do a Save As. Deck005.
Grab that body. Save your work. Do another Save As.
Deck006. And this should be the last of our outside pieces. Perfect.
Save your work. Let's start with the inside supporting pieces now. Save under a new name, Deck007.
Delete that body, and we'll start in the same location we did before just to make it easy for ourselves. We want to make sure we get every body. There we go.
Save your work. Save under a new name, Deck008. Edit the feature, delete that body.
Now move on to the next support piece, which happens to be this very long piece here. All right, save your work. Save under a new name.
All right, save your work again. Let's go ahead and edit the body. Delete that, and then find the next body in our order.
That's that one right there. Save your work. Save under a new name.
All right. Grab this body next. Close it out.
Save your work. Save under a new name, and change out to the next body. Is there anything here? No.
How about moving on? Yep, there is a body underneath. There we go. Save that.
Save under a new name, Deck012. Edit the feature, delete that body, and then add the last of our support bodies. That one right there.
There should be six unique support bodies. Save your work. Let's grab the platform pieces that we walk on for the deck.
Save under a new name, Deck013. Edit the feature, delete that body. Grab this deck piece here.
Save your work. Save as. Deck014.
Delete the body and grab this body next. Save your work. Save as.
Deck015. Delete that and then grab this final body here that has the notches cut out of it. Perfect.
That should be all of our deck pieces. We're going to make sure by loading them into assembly and checking them against our master file. Let's go ahead and close out Deck015.
We'll keep our master file open for right now. Let's go to File, New, Assembly. And then let's go ahead and close this out.
It's asking if we want to load our master file. We don't. Let's just go to Insert Components.
We'll go ahead and browse. In this case, go to Deck001. And then just like we do, we click the green check mark automatically.
If we can't move it, we know that it's made it exactly to the origin. Let's save this assembly. We'll call this SA004.
For subassembly 004. And this will be deck and frame. We're going to add the frame in after the fact.
Beautiful. All right. Let's keep adding our components.
All right. If it's snapping to the correct place, then everything is fine. Save our work.
Let's add the next component. We'll go to Browse. Deck003.
All right. Save your work. Insert Components.
If you don't want to see the master file playground, you can delete that file so it doesn't automatically pop up every time. It's up to you. It's not bothering me, so I'm going to just go ahead and leave it open for right now.
Let's keep adding those deck components by going to Browse. Deck005. Perfect.
Everything is snapping exactly where it should. Again, if it doesn't snap where it should, that's okay. Just make the planes of the sub-assembly with the planes of that part.
All right. Save our work. This is our outside frame.
Let's now grab deck007 through 12 to get our inside support frame. There's the first piece of that part of the assembly. Deck008 is next.
That should be our long deck piece. All right. And it snapped right where it needs to go.
Great. Deck009. Browse.
Deck010. All right. So Components, Browse.
Deck011. Everything is still snapping to the places it needs to be. Looks like this one's going to give me trouble, so I'm just going to close it out with a green check mark.
Oh, and it did snap where it needs to go. Perfect. Insert Components.
I believe that was 10 that we just did, so this next one should be 11. Nope, that's not right. The next one is 12.
Browse. Deck012. All right, and that's all our support pieces.
Now let's add the platform pieces that we walk on. All right, starting with deck013. Insert Components.
Browse. Deck014. All right, it's snapping where it needs to be.
Great. Browse. Deck015.
Perfect. All right, so far that's looking pretty good. Let's go ahead and save our work.
All right, so we've got 15 unique deck pieces. We're just going to do one more double check against our master file to make sure that that makes sense. I'll move this over to the right-hand side, open the master file, move that to the left side.
I'm just going to go through and highlight the pieces as I count them. One, two, three, four, five, six unique outside pieces. Now for support pieces.
One, two, three, four, there we go, five. There isn't one right there, but there is one right here. Six, okay, six unique support pieces.
And now for the platform pieces, one, two, and three. Okay, I feel confident about that. We'll go ahead and close that out.
Next, let's go ahead and bring in a sub-assembly into this sub-assembly. And that sub-assembly we're bringing in is going to be our framing sub-assembly. So let's insert components, go to browse, and look for that particular sub-assembly.
Here it is, SA002 underscore frame. And it already has our reference sketch as part of it, so we don't need to bring that particular sketch back in. All right, now what we have to do is go ahead and complete all the patterns that make our deck and add any other deck support pieces that we're missing.
And that'll be done in the next video. Let's go ahead and save our work. And that's it for this video.
In the next video, we're going to run an assembly pattern to complete our deck and finish out all the parts and pieces to this deck and frame sub-assembly. Thank you.
