Building a Custom Slide Structure with Wall Panels, Support Frames, and Bolt Assembly in CAD Design

In this video, we are going to begin to create the features that make up this slide. Our slide design is going to consist of two pieces. The first is everything you see here, panel, slide,  and legs.

The second piece will be independent of that, and will be an outside panel that sandwiches this wall that we're going to create, and everything will attach together with nuts and bolts, which we will model as well. So let's get started. This is where our slide is going to live.

The first thing I want to do is create a reference sketch in our top view so that we know how all our panels are going to stack together. So let's create a sketch on this face here,  and I'm going to grab my center line and just kind of trace a rectangle that captures the inside edges of these two beams. Perfect.

We're going to sketch within this rectangle. Now that I've done that, I'm going to go ahead and remove these bodies by highlighting the top body,  the bottom body, holding shift, and hiding them. I'm going to orient my model like so,  face it straight on, and then hide all the unnecessary sketch clutter.

Great. So let's begin. I'll grab a center line, connect the midpoint of this line to the midpoint of this line, and then find the midpoint of that line.

Close it out. Let's grab a center rectangle. Our middle panels for this wall are going to be made up of our narrow boards, so we'll go ahead and create a rectangle and set it to the board thickness using our global variable.

All right. Just outside of those support boards are going to be our regular wall planks. Start another center rectangle, but not on the midpoint of any lines, just on the line itself.

Bring it to the edge, make sure they're flush. Set the thickness to our plank thickness. Great.

Let's create one more rectangle, center rectangle. Again, not the midpoint, but just another point on that line. Bring it all the way, make it flush to the other rectangle, and this is going to be the panel that makes up the outside panel of our slide.

So let's give it a thickness. I'm going to make it one and a half inches, and it should sit just inside of the barriers of this beam, which it does. Now that we've done that, let's mirror some entities.

We'll highlight this outside rectangle,  our wall panel, and then we'll mirror about this exact central line. If it gives you trouble, go ahead and undo. Try one more time,  and you can also try deleting one of the references just to see if it was overdefined.

In this case, it was. Deleting that reference cleared it up. Let's go ahead and close out the sketch.

All right. There we have our reference sketch. So first things first, let's make the wall panels themselves.

I'm going to go ahead and re-reveal each of these bodies. We'll save our work. We can see a plan view reference sketch here.

Now, like each of our walls, there's going to be a footer board, and that's no different here. We could add a footer board, or we could simply just make sure we leave enough space for one that's going to go there. In this case, why don't we do that? We'll start a sketch on top of this other footer board sitting just off to the side.

So let's highlight this top surface and select sketch. Now that we've done that, let's convert the entities that make up the wall planks. That will be this line, this line.

It will also be, there we go, this line, this line, this line, this line, and then on the other side,  this line and this line. As you can see, they're floating. That's because we are sketching on this elevated surface here.

Just to make sure that we captured it correctly, let's grab the distance between these two inside lines. It should be 1.5, and it is. Great.

Now that we've done that sketch,  let's go ahead and extrude those walls. We'll extrude them up all the way to this surface here underneath this beam, and uncheck merge result, and close it out with a green check mark. Save your work.

Next, let's create a reference sketch that represents our slide diameter and the slide outer panels. So let's just start a sketch on this surface here, and I'd like to go ahead and use a central line to find the exact center of that panel by connecting the corners and then finding the midpoint of that line. Great.

Then we'll go ahead and just create one that extends all the way down. Grab the center rectangle and start it on that line, but not on the midpoint. Turn it into a square by making the width and the height equal to each other, and then set a distance between the outside of the square and the inside of the beam where it's going to sit.

I'm going to set that at half an inch. Next, we need to locate this square. We'll grab the bottom line, hold shift, and grab the bottom line of this panel, make them collinear, and there we go.

Now, let's create a reference sketch for the slide itself. We'll start a circle in the center of that square, and at the moment, this square has a diameter of just under 30 inches. Let's give it a diameter of 31 inches, and then we'll do an offset of that circle moving to the inside and offset it by two inches, which essentially will be the thickness of our slide material.

Beautiful. Once you've created this, go ahead and close it out and save your work. Now, let's create the outer slide panel.

We'll start a sketch on that same surface, grab a corner rectangle,  and then just trace out that panel sketch that we just made. Use the features, extruded boss base,  and in this case, we're going to extrude up to a vertex, and we're going to grab the vertex from our reference sketch, representing the outside of that panel. Uncheck merge result,  close it out with a green check mark.

Great. Let's do the same thing on the opposite side,  on this surface. Since we've already drawn that sketch, we do not need to repeat it.

We can just convert it from the previous boss extrude that we just made. Once we've done that,  go ahead and extrude up to this vertex, uncheck merge result, and close out the sketch and save our work. Great.

Now, let's go ahead and cut a hole that's going to pierce through all of these walls that we just created. So, let's start a sketch on this outside panel, and that hole is going to be this outer circle that we have here. So, let's convert that entity,  and let's use extruded cut, and in this case, it will be up to surface, and we'll pick this outer surface of that panel, and then close it out.

Great. This is how the child will enter the slide. There's only one problem.

We've got this awkward gap here. We're going to need to bridge that with some material. So, let's do that now.

Let's start a sketch on that same outside surface. Convert this outside circle entity and this inside circle entity. Go to features, extrude up to surface, and then pick this inside slide panel here,  and then we'll leave merge results checked, but just as before when we did this,  we need to be very specific about which bodies it merges with.

So, we go down to the feature scope,  uncheck auto select, and just select this outside slide panel. Beautiful. Now, save your work.

All we're missing are some screw holes and screws attaching everything together. All right, let's start a sketch on that same surface,  and let's grab our center circle, and just somewhere in this corner, let's go ahead and place a circle. Beautiful.

Let's define where that circle lives by setting a smart dimension to the edge. We'll give that a two inch smart dimension, and we'll do it from the top edge as well at two inches. Let's set a diameter of that circle at, let's call it one and a half inches.

Beautiful. And we're going to need four of these. So, let's draw some center lines cutting through the exact center of this slide panel.

There you go. Now, we can use these as lines from the mirror entities command. We'll go to mirror entities, entities to mirror, select this circle, mirror about this vertical line first, do it again, select this circle and this circle, mirror about this horizontal line.

Your holes should be equidistant on all sides and placed appropriately on this panel. If that's not the case, you'll need to adjust the locations of these vertical and horizontal lines by deleting the references and reassigning them to the correct ones. Let's go ahead and hide it so we can better see what this looks like.

Beautiful. Now, we can use this to cut holes that barely go into this panel. All right, let's do that.

Features, extruded cut. Let's do offset from surface. We'll offset from this wall surface and we'll make sure the offset distance is a half inch.

Now, with the offset surface, we can either offset beyond the surface or just before the surface. And we can click this reverse offset button to see what it's doing. We want to offset just before the surface.

In other words, we don't want to cut all the way through this panel. So, let's make sure that that is indeed the condition that we have it set to and then go ahead and execute the command. Let's do the exact same thing on the opposite side on this panel.

Just like before, since we already cut those holes, we don't need to redraw the sketch,  just convert the entities from the previous sketch. We highlight the sketch, select convert entities. Let's go to cut extrude, offset from surface, again, that wall, half inch offset,  and we'll toggle reverse offset to make sure that it doesn't cut through this entire front panel.

That's where we want it. Close it out. Beautiful.

These are the holes that our screw heads are going to nest in. Now, we just need to cut the screw holes themselves. So, why don't we start a sketch on this outside panel here, grab center circle, and create circles that are concentric to each of these holes that we just cut.

If you want to confirm they are concentric, select the circle, select the circle they are meant to share the same center with, and select this make concentric command. What I did is I started each of the circles on the center of the existing circle, and that's how I was able to establish an automatic concentricity. I'm going to highlight each of these circles, make them equal, shrink their size.

There we go. Let's make them a half inch, just big enough for a bolt to go through. Cut extrude.

Let's do up to surface this time,  and we'll select this panel here, this outside surface,  or rather this inside surface. We don't need to necessarily establish which bodies we're cutting through because it's only cutting through just the bodies you want. In other words,  it's cutting through each of our wall panels.

That's great. Let's leave it alone. Close it with a green check mark.

Have a look at our work. Great. We can see light on the other side.

We officially cut through those pieces. It doesn't look like we cut through any other pieces mistakenly, so we are good to go. Let's save our work.

That was a lot, so let's make sure that we highlight the bodies that we just created that are unique. It will be this panel,  one of the wall panels, not both, and this inside panel as well. Great.

Close that with a green check mark. Save our work. In the next video,  we're going to use a projected curve to set the path of our slide as it descends downward.