Mastering Mirror Sketch Entities to Streamline Symmetry in SOLIDWORKS Swing Set Design Projects

In this lesson, we're going to learn how to use the Mirror Sketch Entities tool. Go ahead and open your part. First thing we want to do is cut down the height of these beams.

So I'm going to go ahead and start a sketch on one of the surfaces,  and create a rectangle that captures each of the beams, and then go to Features, Extrude Cut,  set it to blind, and set it to our beam thickness. This is because we're going to be laying some horizontal beams over the top of this, but we don't want it to affect the overall height of our design. All right, here we go.

Next, let's go ahead and build out this top beam, which is ultimately going to be what our swing set attaches to. Start a sketch on this back beam here,  and then create a square starting at that corner. Go ahead and snap that corner,  make the height and width equal.

All right, beautiful. And we're going to extend this. Let's actually take a look at how far we want to extend this to.

All right, 240 inches is the magic number. So back in our file, we're going to create a boss,  extrude, make sure it's going the right direction, and let's bring it to 240 inches. And before we close this out, as always, uncheck Merge Result.

This is a new unique piece, so let's go ahead and color it green. All right, and then create a couple more unique pieces that are going to be a frame that lives along the side, and along this short side as well. So grab this surface here,  open up a sketch, snap that corner, snap that corner, should have a fully defined sketch.

And we're going to extrude this up to surface. Go ahead and select this surface here on that new beam we recently created. Uncheck Merge Result, check the green check mark,  and let's give this beam a color.

Beautiful. There's going to be another one of these here,  but we will add that later in an assembly, but there will be another beam connecting the two. So let's add that beam now.

Create a sketch on this surface here. And for this, let's go ahead and snap to that corner, and then snap to this top edge. And let's create a collinear relationship between this inside edge and this line here.

Make sure that your sketch looks like mine. All right. And once you've done that, go ahead and go into Features,  Extrude, and we'll do Up to Vertex, and just click this vertex right here.

Uncheck Merge Result. Let's go ahead and color this beam since it is unique. Excellent.

All right. This is how we should be looking so far. So far, so good.

Now if you look over to the left, we're going to create this outside stability beam situation that we have going on here. So let's find this very end surface, start a sketch, and then create a beam that goes all the way down. And you can just snap to the existing beam that's already there,  in which case it was this beam here.

Go to Features, Blind. We're going to set the width or the depth of our Boss Extrude to Beam Thickness. It's currently going the wrong direction.

Make sure yours is going towards the playground, like that. Uncheck Merge Result. There we are.

This is not a unique beam because it's just like these other beams here. We're going to go ahead and leave this gray. But while we're at it, let's go to Low Gloss Plastic,  and go all the way up to White Low Gloss Plastic.

Click it and drag it onto that beam. And for this, let's make it assign White Low Gloss to the entire Master File Playground. All right.

Now, you can see that everything that hasn't been made green… Actually,  we'll do it with another more evident color, right? Try this gray. Anything that hasn't been made green is now this really, really dark gray. Now, there's a hierarchy in how these appearances set each other.

And within this hierarchy, a color attached to a body takes precedent over a color attached to an overall part. That's why these green pieces didn't change to dark gray. Now, just like before, let's make sure that default cover is actually a White Low Gloss Plastic.

Set it to the entire part. Great. This will help us just in case we need to change which beams are green.

We can just color them the White Low Gloss Plastic as opposed to green and then continue to move forward. All right. Let's get into mirroring a sketch.

So, we're going to create this feature down here. Create a sketch on the outside face of that beam and grab the corner rectangle, snap it to that corner,  and go ahead and just bring it out arbitrarily. Let's set the height to be our beam thickness.

All right. And we're going to set the width. I'm just going to take a quick measurement here to 12 inches, 12 and a quarter inches.

So, go ahead and grab this and just type in 12.25. Great. Now, you can see there are two of these. We could create another rectangle and do exactly what we just did to this rectangle.

But a faster way to go is to mirror everything happening over here. So, first, we need to mirror against a line. So, let's bring up our center line and snap it to the midpoint of the bottom of this edge and just make it vertical.

Okay. This will be what all these entities mirror against. We're going to go to Sketch Tools, Sketch tab, Mirror Entities.

And what's going to ask us, what entities do we want to mirror? Select all four sides of this rectangle or simply click inside to grab all four sides. And then it's going to ask us,  what are we mirroring about? What is that line that constitutes the mirror? Highlight that box. Click that center line.

And you can see the ghosted yellow line. And click the green check mark. Now, watch this.

If I were to right click on this line and say, delete the vertical relationship and start to move this line, you can see that this mirrored piece moves with it. And that's because it's still mirroring what's happening over here. It's just doing it at a different angle.

All right. Let's go ahead and make that vertical. All right.

Now that we've done that,  let's go ahead and extrude this. And we'll just do it up to that vertex. Uncheck merge result.

Close the green check mark. At least one of these is a unique piece. So let's add it to our green group.

Let's create a new sketch on this surface. Grab the line tool. Snap it to this edge.

Snap it and make it vertical. Snap it back on this bottom edge. And then close the sketch.

What we're working on is making kind of a trapezoid piece right here. So, first things first. Let's make this line and this line parallel to each other.

I'll hold down the shift button and grab both those lines and establish a parallel relationship. However, there's no current angle attached. Also, the thickness of that piece is not determined yet.

Let's determine the thickness first. Now that these are parallel, we can do a smart dimension that sets their distance for each other. And if you can guess, what are we going to use? Beam thickness.

Beautiful. Close that out. And the angle is still not set.

I'd like a clean 45 degree angle. So let's go ahead and do smart dimension. Grab one of the lines that constitutes the angle and any horizontal line to complete the angle.

And then set that to 45. All right. Now we're getting somewhere.

The length of the beam is still not set. Now, I currently have mine at 15 inches. So let's do that.

Grab it and make sure that we're pulling out this direction, not pulling up or pulling to the side. We want to pull against or rather parallel to the line that we're trying to grab a dimension from. Set that to 15 and go ahead and close that out.

Just like before, let's mirror this entity. So I'm going to grab a central line, snap to the midpoint of that beam, make it vertical. And this time, I'm just going to click with the left button on the mouse and highlight all the entities.

And while they're highlighted, I'll go to sketch, click mirror entities, and it'll automatically start populating that box with those entities that I previously highlighted. We're going to mirror about this center line and close out the sketch. And then let's go ahead and extrude to that vertex.

Uncheck merge result. We've created a unique piece. Let's color it.

Beautiful. And I want to also add a cross beam that connects these two beams here for a little bit more support, much like what we have here. We're going to highlight that surface, zoom in on that corner, use our line tool to create that same trapezoid.

It doesn't matter if you create references or not. We're going to set our own references. Just like before,  make these two lines parallel.

Looks like they already have a parallel relationship. That yet another example of SOLIDWORKS automatically assigning references. So again,  we want this reference, but careful in the future to make sure it doesn't assign a reference that you don't want it to have.

Let's go ahead and set the width of this to our beam thickness. Let's set the angle to 45 degrees. We'll grab that line and that line and set it to 45.

And I actually want this to be the exact same piece as these bottom pieces here that we just created. So I'll just go ahead and make that 15 like I did before and extrude to this outside surface. Uncheck merge result.

And since this is a repeat piece, it does not need to be colored green. All right, go ahead and save your work. And that's it for this video.

In the next video, we're going to create width planes for the first time and we're also going to pattern a feature for the first time.