How to Design and Build a Fire Pole Attachment for an Outdoor Playground Using CAD Modeling

In this video we're going to construct the fire pole that's going to be our first accessory for our outdoor playground. It's shown right here to the left in blue. It will be attached to this beam using this metal flange and we'll create all of them today.

Let's go ahead and close this out. First things first, let's determine exactly where that fire pole is going to live by creating a sketch in our top plane. Here we go.

Now I want to be more or less in the exact center of this rectangular space here. Let's go ahead and draft that now. I'll grab a center line and to find the center we can grab one of the corners of the outside edge, grab its opposite corner, and then find the center of that line.

This is still undefined so let's go ahead and see what it needs. All right, a coincident relationship between that line and that dot. There we go.

It's fully black and this is the exact center of that space. Let's put a center rectangle there. Let's turn that rectangle into a square by making the height and width equal and then set the dimension to our beam thickness.

Then for this elevation sketch, let's ghost in what that center pole is going to be and we'll set that diameter as 1.5 and that should be fine. Let's go ahead and close that out and we'll just make sure that it's visible to us as we continue to work. Now that beam that's going to hold our fire pole is going to extrude off of this surface so let's go ahead and start a sketch on that surface.

I'm going to create a center line that connects the outside of these two beams and find the center that may or may not be the center of our space. In this case, why don't we just go ahead and convert one of these entities. There we go.

We can see it right here. Turn that into construction geometry and then I'm going to extrude a line or rather place a center line that starts at the midpoint of that entity. Just kind of bring this up so we can see it.

All right, yep that's right. These are not the same line so this has become irrelevant to us and we'll bring this all the way to the top and we'll use that to create a beam that's going to live right here. All right, let's grab the center rectangle, grab that middle dot, pull it out.

There we go. Let's just make sure these height and width are equal and they are. Wonderful.

All right, so this is our beam. Let's go ahead and extrude it and in this case it'll be up to one of these outside vertices here. Take a look what that looks like.

All right, we'll uncheck merge result, hit the green check mark and that's complete. Now let's create the pole itself. We'll start a sketch right here underneath this surface here and we can see that it aligns perfectly with our plan sketch.

Great, let's convert this entity for our pole and we can extrude this all the way up to surface top plane. I'll uncheck merge result and close out with the green check mark. All right, so far so good.

The last piece we're missing is the bracket, the flange rather, that's going to connect this fire pole to this beam. So let's make that now. Now I'm going to do that with a revolve feature but first I need a plane.

Let's create a plane that is in the center between this surface and this surface. Reference geometry, plane. We'll select this surface as our first reference and this surface is our second.

We now have a mid-plane. Let's close that out. We'll start a sketch on that mid-plane.

I'm going to hit n to get the orientation that works best for me. I'll hit this eyeball to get rid of all this unnecessary clutter. All right and let's create a revolve feature for the first time.

First thing I want to do is find the exact center of that pole and just place a center line there. Next I'm going to create the profile that is going to define what that revolve feature is going to look like. I know it'll come down here, up a little bit, and then perhaps over here, over here,  over here, over here.

Let's go ahead and start defining this by making these two lines equal. Let's set a distance between the outside of this pole. I'll place a center line here.

Between the outside of this pole and the inside of that flange. This will essentially be the gap between our pole and our flange. I'm setting it as a 16th on all sides, 0.0625. Let's set a width.

We'll make this a half inch. Set a length. We'll make this two inches.

Why don't we make this one and a half inches. Great, that is fully defined. I'm going to go up here to this sketch fillet tool.

Click that. Click the first command, sketch fillet,  and just click on this corner here. You can see it's creating a rounded edge to that corner.

We can change the size of that edge by using these arrows to toggle on and off,  or up and down, or we can simply set it to a certain amount and close it out. Great, we'll hit that green check mark again to close that out. Now we have the profile for a revolved feature and we have the line about which it's going to revolve.

Let's do that now. We'll go to features, revolved boss base. First, we need that axis of revolution.

As we know,  it's going to be the center line that we place directly in the center of our pole. It already recognizes this as the profile, but we can double check and just make sure that the contours show that closed sketch entity that we made. We will uncheck merge result.

I'm going to make sure that it fits nicely on that beam and it looks like it does. Let's go ahead and close out that revolve feature. Why don't we give this a little bit of dimensionality? We'll go to fillet,  round that edge, round that edge, set this to 0.125, an eighth of an inch,  and go ahead and close it out.

All right, now that we've created those three bodies to make our fire pole, let's color them because they are unique. Right click on that appearance, edit appearance, add this body,  this body, and this body. Close it out, go back to our feature manager, save our work,  and that's it for this video.

In the next video, we're going to begin creating the pieces that are going to make our swing set.