Creating a Fully Dimensioned Drawing Layout for Frame Sub-Assembly Using Consistent Scale and Views

In this video, we're going to bring in all the unique pieces that make up this sub-assembly and then dimension them in our drawing. We have the list of all those items here,  frame 001 all through to frame 008. So let's open up each of those files and bring them into our drawing.

We'll go to Insert, Drawing View, Model, Browse,  go down to frame 001, Open,  and then just place it off to the side. Yes, it's a little too large. We'll fix that in just a second.

Next, let's go to frame 002, all right,  and place that off to the side as well. Insert, Drawing View, Model, Browse,  frame 003, set it over here,  and let's highlight it and express it so that it's showing the right-hand side. We want to see the length of the piece.

Go to Insert, Drawing View, Model, Browse. Let's look for frame 004. We'll just set that over here.

Hit Escape, Insert, Drawing View, Model,  Browse, frame 005, set it here,  and hit Escape, re-highlight it,  and click a side view so you can see the length. All right, that's one, two, three, four, five. Let's open number six, set that here,  and then just like before,  let's make sure it's showing the lengthwise view.

Let's open frame 007, great,  and then finally frame 008. All right, beautiful. Now, first things first,  you might have noticed that each of these pieces are scaled differently.

We want them to have the same scale so we can get a general idea of how they compare in size when sat side-by-side in our drawing. So let's decide what that scale's gonna be right now. I've already looked into it,  and one to 20 seems to be a good scale for all these pieces to fit in.

So go through each of these pieces and reset the scale to one to 20. There we go, and just move them to the side,  that way you know they're done. And then this one here,  one to 20, this one here,  let's add a zero, making that one to 20.

Move it over to the side. This one is already one to 20, so that's convenient. We'll just move this over to the side,  and then this last piece here.

Okay, beautiful. Now, the next thing we wanna do is make sure they're all facing the same direction. We want all of our long pieces to be vertical.

And we can do that by clicking on an item,  going up here to this button that says Rotate View,  and then setting it to either 90 degrees or negative 90 degrees. Once you've done that, click Apply,  and then close it out with the X in the top right-hand corner. Do that for each of the pieces that are horizontal.

Apply, X, and this piece here. Apply, X, move it to the side. Here we go, this piece here.

All right, and then this piece here. Okay, go ahead and save your work once that's done. All right, let's start laying these pieces in order of their size,  giving them a little bit of breathing room because we're gonna be adding dimensions here.

Here, let's get them a little closer together. And then we'll move this obscure one down here at the bottom. All right, it's starting to get pretty composed.

Now, this particular piece at the scale of one to 20 is a little too large for the page,  but I don't wanna change the scale of this piece any different from what the other pieces are showing. There is a way to fit this on the page without changing the scale,  and I'll show you that right now. If we go to Basic Drawing Tools and go to Break View,  first we'll select the item that needs to be shrunk down.

In this case, it's this piece here. We choose the break orientation,  either vertically or horizontally. Select Horizontal,  and it's gonna have us place two zigzaggy lines,  and the space between those zigzag lines is going to be eliminated,  and the rest of the piece is going to shrink down to accommodate that.

So for the first zigzag,  let's place it 1 3rd from the top,  and the second one, we'll place it 1 3rd from the bottom,  and it's going to eliminate that middle third. There you go. Close it out with the green check mark.

Now, even though this shrunk down on the page,  it's still showing our design of the exact length that it should be,  and if I do a smart dimension,  it still dimensions the entire piece as if those zigzag lines weren't there,  as if the break view wasn't there. 240 inches is what this piece needs to be,  and that's what it is. There we go.

Now, let's go through and add some length dimensions to each of these pieces,  as well as some width dimensions. Take a little time and do that now. Grab this one here,  put this one, and then there you go.

Now, for just this very last piece,  let's go ahead and add a projected view. Bring that down. We already have this dimension here for this line.

Let's grab a dimension for this line. We're doing this because we know that each of these are made from the same beam,  but we just want to confirm that our beam profile is indeed a square,  and these two dimensions allow us to do that. All that's left is this piece here,  so let's grab a smart dimension.

First, we'll get the angle of this line against this line. Then, let's get the distance between this right side line and this left side dot. Now, if we do it on the opposite side,  we're gonna get the exact same dimensions.

We can save time by instead switching to a center line,  which will basically tell us that everything dimensioned on one half of the center line is equal to everything dimensioned on the other half of the center line. Let's go up to Basic Drawing Tools and click Center Line. Now, we need to select two lines for that center line to live between.

Let's select this bottom line here and this right line here,  and then close it out with a green check mark. We now have a center line bisecting the exact middle of this angled piece. That tells us that even though this is 45 degrees,  this angle is also 45 degrees,  and if this is 10.61,  then the distance between this top and this base is also 10.61. There we go.

Go ahead and save your work. All that's missing are some balloons attached to these pieces so that we can look at the piece,  look at its size,  and then equate it to what's happening in our bill of materials so we know how many of each piece we need to cut. So let's do that now.

For this, we could use Auto Balloon,  but the problem is,  is SOLIDWORKS is recognizing each of these unique pieces as its own entity,  not necessarily part of an assembly. That's because we brought them in one by one. If we were to, say,  manually attach balloons to each one,  it's going to assign each one the value of one because they all represent one of one as their respective parts.

We need to give them balloons,  but make sure that the item number lists exactly what's being shown in our item number column. So first things first,  let's go ahead and put those balloons there. We're gonna do this manually,  attaching one balloon to each piece,  and let's attach this balloon here,  this one,  I'm gonna delete that.

There we go. And then I'll go ahead and grab a balloon right there. Perfect.

In fact, I'm gonna move this up here so that it's very clear what we are looking at. Okay, beautiful. All right, now we need to go through and manually change what's written in each of these balloons.

So one thing we can do is we can highlight the balloon itself,  go to Settings, Balloon Text,  and we can set it to Part Number. And that actually solves the problem for us because we know that item number three is also called frame 003. But for this, just for cleanliness,  because this is a lot of text,  I'd rather have it just say the item number.

So instead of Part Number,  I'm going to go to Text and then type in three. All right. Now I'm gonna take a look at this one.

This is part 007, which is item number seven. So I'll highlight that balloon,  go to Text and type seven. If you wanna see what each of these pieces is,  you can click on it, go to Open Part,  and without clicking Open Part,  it'll show you what that part name is.

This is frame 004, which is item number four. So I'll highlight that balloon,  and then assign it the number four. This one is frame 008, which is item number eight.

All right. Close that out. Beautiful.

This one is frame 005. We'll go to Text and change this number to five. This one is, here we go, frame 002,  which is item number two.

We'll set that there. And this one is frame 006, which is item number six. We'll change that text as well to number six.

And this one is frame 001. Oh, don't wanna open it,  which is already set to one, which is great. Once you've done that, go ahead and save your work.

And that's it for this video. In the next video, we are going to gather all our drawings,  our assemblies and our part files into a zip folder called a Pack and Go and save it so that it can't be altered anymore.