Mastering Sketch Visibility and Cut Extrudes for Precise Post and Beam Placement in SolidWorks

In this video, we're going to begin by learning how to hide sketches that are no longer needed. We're also going to show cut extrude and we'll use that to set our main post locations as we can see in this model over here on the left. All right, so starting off, hiding sketches and planes so they don't clutter up our space.

One way to do that is to go to the very top to this eyeball here and it will hide all types. This drop down menu lets us know the things that it would be hiding, right? You can notice that the plane and the two sketches suddenly went away. To bring them back, we'll just click the eyeball again and here they are.

Now, if we want to hide them individually, we simply go over here to the left to the feature manager and click on the sketch or plane we want to hide. Click this hide button and it'll go away. We'll do that for the height sketch and why don't we do that for the plane as well.

Now, for this particular video, we're going to be using the height sketch,  so I'm going to conceal that or I'm going to reveal that rather. All right, let's start setting some post locations. I'm going to start a sketch on the top plane and let's look into this sketch here.

All right, and as you can see, these posts are nested just inside that outside frame. Here we go, so let's go ahead and match that now. Feel free to follow along.

I'm going to go to sketch, corner rectangle, snap that inside corner, create a rectangle. Go down here, snap this inside corner, create a rectangle, snap, create a rectangle. We're going to snap right here, create a rectangle,  and let's just snap along this line and create a rectangle.

Oh, and we're missing one, so I'll go ahead and add it,  snap it along that line and just create a rectangle. First things first, let's make these rectangles into squares that match each other. We'll highlight a height and width line on every rectangle shown.

We're holding shift to do that. With them all highlighted, we'll click equals, great. Now let's set them in their respective places.

Click this line here on that square and this line on that square, make them colinear. All right, now we're setting these locations appropriately, and then this line and this line set to colinear are going to set all our rectangles in the exact position they need to be. All we're missing is the dimension, so let's go to smart dimension,  click one of the lines, tap the equals key, and go to beam thickness.

All right, now that we've done that, let's cut some holes to make way for our beams. I'll go to features and we'll go to extrude cut. All right, and for this, let's go ahead and have through all as the condition of how it cuts.

It's going to cut through every solid model that we have up to the very top. There we go. Now, it's giving us this notification saying, when you execute this cut extrude,  you are taking some of these bodies and you're separating them into multiple bodies because you're cutting them apart.

First, do you want to do this or do you want to cancel? Second, do you want to do this to all the bodies that are being affected? Or would you just like to select those bodies being affected and decide which ones are going to be cut into pieces and which ones are going to remain solid? You can make that choice. For this, let's go ahead and keep all bodies and click OK. Great, and it did.

It cut some pieces. For instance, this was once one large plank and now it is two planks. That is totally cool.

All right, now that we've done this, let's take a look and see what happens if we were to move one of the rectangle locations. Let's go back into cut extrude, open up that sketch with edit sketch,  and I'm going to go ahead and grab this coincident relationship and delete it. Then move this rectangle, say, over here.

Let's close out the sketch and see what happens. All right, you can see that cut went away. Now, the reason is because we go into cut extrude.

When we allowed it to cut through every body that was being affected by it,  it selected just those bodies that were initially affected by the locations of these squares. It didn't select these three planks, right? We have to add those in ourselves manually. We'll highlight that box, click these three planks.

All right, click the green check mark. It's asking us the same thing. We'll go ahead and click OK, and there it is.

Now we've created a new cut here on these planks. Just to give you an idea of how that works. Now that we understand that, let's go back and place the rectangle where it needs to be.

We'll take this corner and snap it to that inside edge. There we go, and close out the sketch. Great, let's save our work.

CTRL-Save. Now let's create the beams to go all the way through. All right, we'll start a sketch on the top plane.

And for this, I'm going to go to corner rectangle. I'm just going to trace basically the squares that we just cut. So let's go one by one, snap to the corners.

We'll go down here to this one, snap to corner. Make sure you're snapping the right corner. You might have to zoom in with your scroll wheel.

And then for this, this is a little confusing, right? Because there's a gap here that's kind of making it difficult to discern where the rectangle is. So let's just go ahead and snap to that corner and snap arbitrarily here. Select this line and select this square line and make them collinear.

Just to make sure that we're not snapping to the wrong thing. Then we'll make this line and this line collinear. All right, now let's make our beams.

We'll go to features, extrude boss base. And for this, let's go to up to vertex, right? I'm going to delete what's already there by right clicking and hitting delete. And let's click the very tippy top of this from our height sketch, this vertex here.

All right, now, just like before, uncheck merge result. Click the green check mark. There we go.

All right, I'm going to go ahead and close this sketch so we can see what's next. All right, we still have two beams yet to set. So let's do those now.

Let's make a sketch on the top plane. And just like before, we'll grab corner rectangle. Grab that inside nested corner right against the frames.

Put one there. Beautiful. Let's make these squares that are equal to each other.

Let's set a dimension. In this case, we could do the smart dimension in a global variable. But I'm just going to grab one of these edges and hold shift and grab this edge and make them equal.

Same result, right? Now, for this, we don't… Well, actually, for this, we do have to cut because we're going to be cutting through some of these inside frames. So let's do that now. Extrude cut.

And for this, let's extrude so that these posts can live just underneath this plank pattern. So for that, I'm going to go to up to vertex and just click that right there. That's one way to do it.

You could also go up to surface and select one of the under surfaces of the planks. It does the same thing. All right.

Now, let's go ahead and close this out and see how it looks. Great. It's created some space for our beams to live.

All right. And just like before, let's start a sketch on the top plane. Let's… I'm going to type the N key so it can flip my normal too.

You can also just like use your scroll wheel to go underneath. Make sure you're looking underneath straight on at your piece. All right.

Grab the corner rectangle. There you go. Corner rectangle.

There you go. Let's make them equal to each other. Oh, there must be something going on here.

All right. Let's start by making these equal. All right.

We'll make these equal. Okay. Let's make these collinear.

All right. That's one way to do it. Okay.

Great. Now, let's go ahead and make these lines collinear. Why don't we do it that way? You can also make the line equal to one of these existing edges.

Same difference. All right. We'll go to features, extrude boss base.

And for this, just like before, let's extrude to a surface underneath these planks. So let's go to up to surface. Highlight one of those under plank surfaces.

As before, you can also do up to vertex and just click a vertex that makes it terminate at the exact same point. Uncheck merge result. All right.

And then click the green check mark. All right. Looking good.

Let's go ahead and save our work with control S. And let's review any new pieces that we need to color with our green color. Okay. Because we did create some new bodies.

We cut some bodies into pieces, as you can recall. So first things first. All right.

This one's going to have to be green. All right. Let's see what we have to do here.

All right. We're over here in the appearances tab. Right click and then go to edit appearance.

All right. Make sure that is selected because that's new. We'll select this one because that is new as well.

This one is equal to this one. We only need to select one of those. And this is equal to this.

So that should constitute. Great. That unique piece.

And then we'll select this side piece here. Make sure that your green solids match mine. All right.

When we're happy with that, just go ahead and click the OK button. Great. Again, save your work.

And that's it for this video. In the next video, we're going to take a break from this model and review some of the ways you can move quickly through the program,  as well as double check that we're designing appropriately so we don't run into problems later in the course.