Creating and Shaping Rope Components in SOLIDWORKS to Complete the Custom Rope Ladder Assembly

For this video, we're going to finish out our rope ladder by building the rope items themselves. You can see here to the left there are three unique rope pieces that we need to make that eventually will be patterned into the entire rope ladder in our final general assembly. Let's get started.

So in a previous video, we created a plane that passed through the center of these two eyelet brackets. Let's locate that plane now. There we go.

And let's start a sketch on that plane. Just like before, SOLIDWORKS is a little confused as to what the right orientation of our model is,  but that's fine. Let's just go ahead and use the keypad to get at a good perspective our own.

Now, let's start by creating the rope that connects this side cylinder to this singled out cylinder here. All right, first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to grab a center line and I want to establish the exact center of these cylinders in 2D space. Let's grab this one and this one and this one.

Okay, the reason I'm doing that is because I want something that I can grab a tangency reference to when I create my spline. Let's go to spline next because this rope is going to be an organic shape, unlike an arc. Let's go ahead and start it here at the center of that bracket and then move it to the center of that one.

Go ahead and use these arrows to get a basic idea of what it's going to look like,  but we really want that tangent relationship to make them perfect. We'll highlight the spline,  highlight this line, and create a tangent relationship. Then we'll highlight the spline again and highlight this line here.

There we go. And create a tangent relationship there as well. Just like we do with the slide, let's use these curvature arrows to get a nice smooth curvature for our rope, something that feels natural and realistic.

That looks good to me,  so we'll close out the sketch. Let's use this line to create a sweep. All right, with that line highlighted, we can go to circular profile and we can establish the diameter of this circle to one inch, uncheck merge result,  and this is our first rope feature here.

There we are. Beautiful. Now, moving on,  we're going to need to create the rope that doesn't connect itself to the center, but rather connects all the way across these two beams.

And most of the aspects of that feature is created,  so let's start by patterning this rope feature here. Now, we already have a sketch established that sets that pattern in place, so let's use that if we can. I'm going to make sure it's visible.

I'm going to hide a few other sketches that are getting in the way. All right, now let's go to linear pattern. And as always, the first thing we do is grab the entities that we are going to pattern.

In this case, I'm going to grab this eyelet, I'm going to grab this bracket, and I'm going to grab this rope, just these three. For the direction, I want to pattern vertically,  so I'll pick an edge of our playground that is moving vertically. And then we could do spacing to instances, but in this case, I'm doing up to reference.

And the first thing we do is we select a reference for it to pattern to, and I'm going to zoom into that sketch we made earlier to this bottom line right here and select that bottom line there. For the selected reference, I want to zoom in to this eyelet here and select the edge at the very end of that bottom surface. If that doesn't work, you can also select a vertex.

There we go. All right, it's patterning appropriately. Now, we don't need to pattern all the way down each of the five instances,  just one set of two instances will do.

Let's go ahead and close this out. Make sure that your instances is set to two. If you have a cluster of items, you're going to have to fix that here in your instances box.

Make sure that's two. Close it out with a green check mark,  and there we go. Let's save our work.

There we are. Now, the next thing we want to do is change the direction of this rope. And the first thing I'm going to do is cut the edge of this rope off and then extend it over to the side.

So let's do that now. I'm going to open up a sketch on that same plane that we were just on. And as before, we're going to need to go ahead and use the keypad to orient ourselves correctly.

I'm going to click this eyeball to close out all the unnecessary clutter. I'm going to go to Convert Entities and grab this bottom edge of that rope. And I'm going to grab, well rather, let's delete that.

Let's grab the bottom edge of this rope and maybe the top edge as well. We might use both. We'll see.

Highlight them,  make them for construction only. Now, let's create the square that's going to cut this rope first. We'll grab a line and kind of find the bottom edge of that rope.

Create a little box for ourself, like so. I'm going to establish a tangent relationship between this line and this entity here. And that's probably enough to get us a completely fully defined sketch.

You may have to add a few more references to get where I'm at here. Let's cut this rope. We'll go to Extruded Cut.

Let's just do through all both and just make sure that just this rope body is selected. All right, let's save our work. Now, what I want to do is extend the rope from this surface out so it just hits the middle of where our rope ladder is going to live.

But I don't have a vertex or a plane or anything to reference that aligns with that middle that I'm speaking of. We're going to have to create a plane first. Let's go ahead and do that.

Start a sketch on this face. Grab a center line and zoom in and then just find two lines and then find the center and then pull that line all the way down by zooming out. Now we have a fully defined line.

Let's use this to make a plane. I'll go to Reference Geometry, Plane. I'm going to make sure that sketch is visible.

Our first reference is that line itself. Our second reference is a surface for it to be perpendicular to. That'll do just fine.

All right, I'm going to go ahead and hide these sketches again. Now, I'll start a sketch on this surface here that we just cut and let's convert that entity. Let's go to Features, Extrude Boss Base, and it's going to ask us where we want to extrude to.

We want to extrude to that plane we just made. We'll go to Up to Surface, select that plane,  and as we've done in the past, we'll leave Merge Result checked, but we have to be very selective about what bodies it merges to. We'll uncheck Auto Select down here and select just this portion of the row and click the green check mark.

Go ahead and save your work. Now, on this plane here that bisects the center of these eyelets, let's start a new sketch. We'll use the keypad to orient ourselves correctly, and we'll hit the eyeball to hide all the unnecessary clutter.

And for this, we want to make this little element, this rope element right here, to connect this top rope to this rope. All right, let's do that now. The first thing I'm going to do is convert some entities.

Let's go to Convert Entities, and I'm going to grab this bottom edge, and I'm going to grab this edge and this edge. You can see them highlighted in blue. Close it out with the green check mark.

Let's highlight everything by using the mouse,  holding it down, and lassoing a selection, and clicking For Construction. Great. Now,  let's create the rectangle that's going to make the rope that connects these two guys.

First things first, grab a center line, and let's figure out where that rope is going to live. And I believe it's going to live right here where this crests or arcs at its deepest. So I'm just going to basically locate where that is, start a line, and bring it down.

It looks like it found the tangent edge, but just for fun, I'm going to create a line out in space and make sure that it's… I would say vertical, but again, SOLIDWORKS is mistaking the orientation of our model in comparison to this plane. So I'm going to delete this and make it horizontal so it looks vertical to us. This isn't something I'll have to do all the time, but it does occur sometimes.

I'm going to create a relationship between this line and this vertex, make them coincident, but I can move this line anywhere. If I want to find the exact bottom edge of that edge,  what I can do is create another center line and make it perpendicular to the line I just made,  and then make this new line and this bottom edge tangent. That sets this line exactly where we want it to be.

Let's go ahead and bring this down, make those coincident,  and then use a center line and find the center of this new line. Great, we now have everything we need to create that rope. Let's grab a center rectangle, start it on the center of this line,  pull it out.

We want the diameter of this rope to match this rope, so I'm going to use a center line to connect the edges of that rope to create a line that we can make equal to the bottom of this rectangle. All right, now all we have to do is set the height. A bracket is going to hold this rope, so we don't have to be necessarily perfect, but we do have to set something.

So I'm going to grab Smart Dimension and create a distance between this vertex and this line, and we're going to set that to, say, three quarters of an inch, 0.75. Let's extrude this as a mid-plane and then extrude it the diameter of a rope. In this case, we're using one inch. We'll uncheck Merge Result, and then we'll close out the feature.

What we made is a lovely rectangle, but we need to turn that into a rope, so let's just soften these edges. We can do that with the Fillet tool. Let's grab all four sides, one, two, three, and I could use my scroll wheel to spin around and grab the other side, but instead, just so you're aware, you can oftentimes mouse over where that fourth edge would be, even if you can't see it, and SOLIDWORKS will find it for you.

There it is. I'm going to click that. It grabbed all four edges.

Now, with this one-inch diameter rope, our first instinct to make it a cylinder is to use a half inch as our radius, and we totally could do that and it would work perfectly fine. However, what I like to do is, anytime I'm turning a rectangle into a cylinder, I'd like to leave myself just a little bit of a flat edge on all sides by reducing the radius just a hair, because you never know when you're going to need these flat surfaces as references or mating surfaces down the line,  and even though it looks the same as a perfect cylinder, it has this little extra feature that we can use, and I like to have that, so I'm going to go ahead and use 0.45 as my dimension for my radius here. Let's save our work.

All right. We created three new bodies. Let's go ahead and color them now.

This rope, this rope, and this rope. Oh, and this rope. I'll tell you what.

Let's go back into this feature, highlight it, edit it, uncheck merge result, or check merge result, uncheck auto select, and make sure it has that rope selected just to be super safe. I want this to be the same body. All right.

Looks like it's grabbing surfaces. I want to grab bodies. Let's grab that body, grab that body, and grab that body just to be safe.

Save your work,  and that's it. That's it for this video. In the next video, we're going to dive into configurations for the very first time.