Building Custom Brackets and Sketch Planes for a Rope Ladder Assembly in SOLIDWORKS

Hello, in this video we are going to continue the features that are going to make up our rope ladder. All right, so we have our two eyelets set and they are in alignment from a side elevation perspective. We want to start making the brackets over here to the left that live in these eyelets or connect to these eyelets, but first we need a plane that they're going to be sketched upon.

So let's do that now. To establish that plane, let's start a sketch,  say on this surface here, zoom in, use our center line to connect the center of this eyelet to the center of this eyelet. We'll close out that sketch.

This line will be the first reference in our plane. With that still highlighted, let's go to reference geometry, plane. Looks like it lost that reference.

We'll re-highlight it, that's okay. The first reference is that line, the second reference will be a surface that it is perpendicular to. This surface will do fine, and there is our plane.

Let's go ahead and close it out. Now we have something to sketch upon, so let's start a sketch on that plane. All right, so before we continue, you can see that once we started a sketch, it doesn't have our playground oriented in the right direction.

It doesn't know what the top and bottom and sides of our playground are. It just recognizes models in space. The reason this is important is because if we try to establish a vertical reference or a horizontal reference with some of our lines,  it may get those backwards because, again, it's recognizing this space as the top of that plane and this space is the bottom when actually they're the sides.

For right now, let's just use our keypad to orient ourselves correctly so we can look at our model the way that it needs to be seen to create our sketches. We'll hit this eyeball to close out all the unnecessary clutter,  and if we come across a situation with a vertical or horizontal issue, we'll fix it as it emerges. First things first, let's build this bracket shown over here to the left.

Let's zoom in to this eyelet right here, and I want to see all the dimensions of it,  so let's go up to display style and show the hidden lines, and while we're here,  why don't we just go ahead and convert that entity? You can convert this one too. Why not? Highlight them. Let's make them construction lines.

Great. First things first, let's build the circle of that eyelet. I want that circle to be in alignment perfectly down the center,  so we need a center line to do that.

Let's grab a center line, and let's find the exact center of this eyelet. Now, just so you can see what I mean, if we highlight this line which looks vertical to us, the reference over here says horizontal. Let's keep that in mind if we try to establish these references on our own, but for right now, it's facing the right direction.

That's what's important. We have this center line. Let's grab a center circle,  grab the bottom vertex of this line, and bring it out like this.

Let's set the diameter of this circle to one inch and create a coincident relationship between the circle itself and one of these two vertices here. Perfect. Let's offset this entity now.

There we go. Oh, looks like I grabbed the wrong thing. Sometimes it's easier to select the sketch entity first, then go to offset.

There we go. Set the offset distance to 25 and make sure that it's offsetting to the outside. Again, we're trying to make this sketch over here to the left.

Next, let's create this box. We'll grab a line tool,  and then just pull this out to the side. It can be random right now.

We're going to fix it in a second. Let's use trim entities to trim this bottom arc here. Perfect.

We know that this line and this line need to be equal. Great. All right.

We're almost there. Let's make the height of this box two inches. Let's make the width of this box 2.25. Then we got to set how high that box moves up this circle.

What I want to do is create a tangent relationship between one of these lines and this inside circle here. Great. That looks good to me.

While we're at it, let's create this bracket over here to the right, which will be a little bit different. This is going to hold two ropes, and this bracket to the right is going to hold one. Like we did before, let's go ahead and convert some entities that are going to make our life just a little bit easier.

We'll grab that,  and then grab that. Make sure that those entities are construction lines. Then let's start building our bracket.

We'll start with a center circle. Just pull it off to the side. Just like before,  let's find the exact center of this eyelet and align it with the center of our circle.

We found the midpoint of that line. I'm going to bring it to the center of the circle. Again, we may want to establish a vertical relationship, but it's going to appear horizontal.

That's because SOLIDWORKS has got our model mismatched in reference to the plane that we're sketching on. We'll delete the vertical relationship, establish the horizontal relationship,  and that happens to work for this sketch. Again, this isn't something you'll have to deal with all the time, but every now and then it does come up.

All right. We'll establish a coincident relationship between one of these vertices here and our circle. Let's make this circle and this inside circle equal to each other.

Great. Just like before, we'll use offset entities. Just to be safe,  we'll select the entity first, then click offset.

0.25 offsetting outside. Great. Now we need to create this angled rectangle moving off of the side.

The first thing I'm going to do is grab a center line and just set that direction over here. Beautiful. Then we'll use smart dimension to establish that 120-degree angle that is currently being shown over here.

Now, let's go to our rectangle tool in the drop-down menu and skip four buttons down to three-point center rectangle. Add an angle, as you can see. Now, as we know, when we establish rectangles, it automatically has vertical and horizontal relationships built in to its sides, top, and bottom.

We want to create a rectangle where that isn't the case, where we establish the directionality of the sides and the top and the bottom. That's why we're using this particular rectangle tool. Let's grab the end of this center line, this vertex, to establish the center of that rectangle.

Now it's asking us,  with the second click, what direction do you want this rectangle to face? Let's click that line. Now, if we pull out, it's creating a rectangle that's perfectly aligned with our center line. Let's just close it out.

Now, oftentimes, what you will have to do with angled rectangles is you will have to reaffirm the directionality by establishing a parallel relationship between one of the lines and the center line used to create it. There we go. This rectangle will always be 120 degrees off this middle line here.

Great. First things first, let's bring this rectangle up to the outside circle and establish a coincident relationship. Let's delete any unnecessary lines jumbled up here in the middle with our trim tool.

There we go. Let's establish some measurements. 1.125. All right.

Let's get our smart dimension tool. This is going to be 1.125. There we go. I guess that's enough to define it.

Oh, we actually need to define the length of this rectangle. We can see that line is still blue. Why don't we see what that is here? There we go.

Two inches. All right. For our own model,  grab this line and make it two inches.

Great. We now have the beginning of our two main brackets that hold our rope. Let's extrude these now.

We'll go to features, extrude box base,  make sure that midplane is set, and set the extrusion length to 0.25. Uncheck merge result and hit the green check mark. All right. Beautiful.

Now, I'll show you what this is eventually going to become. We're going to need to build some cylinders here. But the reason we extruded these as plates first is because we want access to the surfaces underneath as sketch planes.

All right. So, let's go ahead and get ourselves back into a regular display state with shaded edges. Save our work.

All right. And we'll start by building the two cylinders on this bracket here. So, let's grab this new sketch plane underneath that we created and start a sketch.

Look for the blue glowing item. That is where we need to be. We'll zoom in with our scroll wheel.

I'm using my mouse gestures to grab a center line and I'm grabbing midpoint to midpoint to find the exact center of this space. And the reason I'm doing that is because I'm going to mirror one circle on either side. Let's grab a center circle and just plug it into this line and pull it out.

We're going to set the diameter of this circle to just above an inch. Let's go for an inch and a quarter. The reason is because our rope diameter is going to be an inch and we want that to be able to fit into an element that's larger.

So, we're making something a little bit larger than that. Now that we've made that, let's mirror it to the other side. There's our mirror entity.

We mirror about this center line here. And we need to establish how far apart these circles are from each other. And I'm going to go ahead and just kind of get them fairly close and grab a center line, snap the exact side of that circle to the exact side of this circle, and use smart dimension to establish an exact distance.

In this case, let's call it 1 16th of an inch. Perfect. Once we've done that, we can extrude it up to this vertex.

Now for this, we do want to leave merge result checked because this is part of the same bracket that we're creating. But as always, if we do merge results, we want to be very selective about the bodies that we merge them to. So, we go down here to feature scope,  click selected bodies, and just select this plate right here.

Beautiful. All right. That bracket is complete.

Let's do the same thing to this single bracket that we just did to the double here. We'll go to the bottom surface and start a sketch. Zoom in to the blue glowing item.

Use a central line to find the exact center of that surface. All right. There we go.

And then now that we have the exact center, grab a circle, start it in the center, pull it out,  and then set the diameter so that the outside of that circle is coincident with one of these corners on this bottom surface. Beautiful. Go to features, extrude boss base.

We'll go up to vertex. There we go. And just like before, leave merge result checked, but select the bracket body specifically.

Close it out. Now, let's go ahead and smooth out some of these items. We'll do that with the fillet tool.

Why don't we set our fillet size to 0.125 for now and start selecting the four sides, the four edges that the fillet needs to capture. There we go. Perfect.

That's a good one. We'll close that out. That bracket's looking pretty good.

Let's go to the next one. Fillet tool, one edge, two edge, three edge, and four. There we go.

All right. Now,  we have this set to 1.25. As a reminder, let's go ahead and close it out. If yours wasn't showing a yellow ghosted fillet, it's because your fillet was too large and you need to lower the dimension by a hair.

All right. There we go. Now that that's done, please save your work.

These are both unique brackets, so let's go ahead and color them. Not the eyelid,  because these are copied bodies. Let's just color the new brackets that we made.

Great. Close that out. Save your work again.

And that's it for this video. In the next video,  we're going to move on to the ropes themselves to finish out all the features required to make this rope ladder.