Learn how to create a fire pole sub-assembly in SolidWorks, step-by-step, while also covering the renaming of parts and relinking them to an assembly. This tutorial includes tips on fixing missing references and ensuring correct names are displayed in the feature manager.
Key Insights:
- The tutorial guides you through renaming parts, making the amendment from 'mirror stair underscore 007' to 'stair underscore 007.1', demonstrating how to implement this change in your own work.
- The content emphasizes that while SolidWorks may show lost parts after renaming, these can be relinked by adjusting the references in the file opening menu. This process ensures the correct parts are identified within the sub-assembly.
- The tutorial concludes with the creation of a fire pole sub-assembly, showcasing the process from the initial start of a new part file to a finished, correctly named sub-assembly.
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In this video, we're going to create the fire pole sub-assembly. We're also going to go through the process of renaming a part and relinking it to an assembly. All right, so this is our general assembly so far.
It's getting pretty close to being done. Let's go ahead and close it out, but before we do, let's open the stair and handrail sub-assembly. All right, I'll minimize this, close that out, and then bring that up again.
Now, you might remember in the last video, it created this mirror stair underscore 007. I actually don't like that naming convention, so I'm making the choice to rename it to stair underscore 007.1. Let's go ahead and do that now. Let's close out this sub-assembly and go to file, open, and we'll find that item, mirror stair 007, highlight it, delete that portion, add 0.1, and we'll do the same thing to mirror stair underscore 0011.
Okay, let's go ahead and hit cancel. We've already done our job, and just to see how it turned out, let's open that sub-assembly again. Okay, it's telling us we just lost some parts.
It's because it's trying to find mirror stair 007 and 011, but those no longer exist. Since it doesn't have those, it's removed those from the sub-assembly, but have no fear, we can bring them back. Okay, so let's go ahead and close this out, but do not save.
Don't save. Here we go. Now, in this page, go to file, open, and then find the correct sub-assembly, stair and handrail.
Now, if you look down here, there's a menu that's unique to the opening file menu that only SolidWorks has. You won't find this in your regular file storage app on your computer. This is the only part of SolidWorks.
If you go down here to references, it's going to let you know all the references that exist in that sub-assembly, all the parts. Now, it's missing mirror stair 007 and mirror stair 11, but we can change those out to the new ones simply by double-clicking the first one, 007, and relinking it to the correct one, 007.1, open, and double-clicking mirror stair 0011, and relinking it to the correct updated file name, which is going to be stair 011.1. These green text items show that those are new links. Let's click okay.
Now, let's open that sub-assembly. All right. Now, if we look in our feature manager, it no longer says mirror stair.
It shows the correct name, which in this case has the 0.1 at the end of it. Since you've done this, save your work. All right.
Now, let's open up our general assembly to see that that has updated appropriately. It might have to rebuild. There we go.
All right. It looks good. If we highlight this item, we can see that it has the correct name.
Okay. Great. Let's go ahead and save our general assembly and close it out.
All right. Next up, we're going to make the sub-assembly that constitutes our fire pole. It shouldn't take too long.
We'll go to file, open, and bring up our master file playground. Excellent. We just need two pieces, this top bracket and the pole itself.
Let's start a new part file. Close out the sketch. Insert part master file playground.
Click okay. And then make sure to click the green check mark. There we are.
Delete keep body. First, we'll keep this bracket. Now, let's save this.
We'll call this fire pole underscore 001. Save your work. Save it under a new name, 002, and then edit the feature, removing this body and selecting the pole itself.
Save your work. Close it out. Close out the master model, and let's start a new assembly for the fire pole.
All right. It should be here. Fire pole 001.
Click the green check mark. Make sure that it's stuck in place. It is.
Great. Fire pole 002. There we go.
Now, we'll want another bracket here at the bottom as well. So, first things first, let's go ahead and save this. We'll call this SA008 fire pole.
All right. Grab 001 from the feature manager and bring it down. Let's go ahead and mate it in place.
Now, for this, we're going to use a concentric mate, which as you know, means that the circles share the exact same center, and it is the correct mate for mating cylinders into each other. So, we'll grab a surface that represents a cylinder on our piece and grab a surface that represents a cylinder on the other piece. They now share the same center or internal axis, but this bracket is facing the wrong direction.
So, we'll go to mate alignment and flip it upside down. Allow that mate to go through and then click this surface and the bottom surface, making them coincident and close it out completely. Save your work.
Let's open our general assembly. Wait for it to reload. Okay.
And let's insert our new sub-assembly. There you go. Looking pretty good.
Save your work. In the next video, we're going to add the brackets to our general assembly.
