Learn how to create a ring or link that secures a chain to a beam using CAD software. This step-by-step tutorial will guide you through the process, from starting a sketch to rounding out the edges of the design.
Key Insights
- The process begins with selecting the plane for the sketch and drawing an initial outline. The center line is determined based on the midpoint of the chain link.
- A center circle is drawn and offset entities are created to eliminate overlapping items. The circle is then adjusted to hug the inside of the chain link.
- The sketch is extruded and edges are rounded using the fillet tool. The tutorial concludes with the creation of a new body and a reminder to save work regularly.
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In this lesson we are going to make the ring or link that holds our chain to the beam above it. All right, so first we're going to select the plane on which that sketch is going to live and just like before we have that wire that's cut in half so let's use the surface created by that. Start a sketch on that surface and we'll zoom into where that connection is going to live.
Let's just start drawing that out in blue lines just to get a basic idea of what it's going to look like. I'll start with the center line, grab the center of this line so I can get the middle of that chain link, bring it right up so this will be where our hook enters the beam. Let's grab the center rectangle, just grab a spot on this line, not the midpoint, just another random spot, and then we'll set a width of a quarter inch.
With this line collinear to the bottom of the beam we can adjust the height as necessary. Let's go ahead and grab a center circle, grab another point on that line and just draw a circle out. Next we're going to offset the entities of that circle and we'll put that at a quarter inch and then we'll use trim entities to kind of get rid of the items that are overlapping.
Trim here, trim here, and then trim these entities here to create what's going to eventually be our eye hook. Let's make sure this is vertical, make sure this is vertical. I'm going to set a horizontal relationship between this point and this point.
Great, all right, so far so good. Now we need this circle to hug the inside of this chain link but there's not really any line for us to convert to get that perfect tangent relationship. There is a way however to make a line appear so that we can convert it.
If we hit normal to and get straight on so we're looking at our hook perpendicularly we can go up here to display style to this drop down menu. Four buttons down is hidden lines visible and if we zoom in we can see it's creating a dashed line representing the bottom of that chain where this circle is going to be tangent to it. So let's actually grab that line again.
We want to be normal to our sketch when we do this. We'll grab that line, here we go, let's go to convert entities, select that arc. You can see it's selecting a silhouetted edge.
It's not a real edge, it's just a silhouette created by our perspective. Close it out with a green check mark and there it is. We'll make sure it's a construction line and then we'll highlight that new arc and the inside of this circle and make them tangent.
All right, now all we need to do is set the diameter of this outside circle and we'll set that radius to say 0.5 making the diameter one inch. I'm going to double check that just by creating a line going all the way across and taking a measurement. One inch, beautiful.
All right, now all that's left is to extrude this sketch. We'll go to boss extrude, set it to mid-plane, have it set to 0.25 and uncheck merge result. Close it out with a green check mark and last but not least we need to round out these edges and if you can remember the tool we use to do that is the fillet tool and we can just click the button and any edge that needs to be rounded we can just select those edges.
We'll select this edge here, this opposite edge here, these outside edges and then all four of the outside edges that make this circle. Now while we have it at this state let's go back up to display style and select that first button shaded with edges. You can see that once we started to select these extra four lines the ghost of that fillet rather disappeared.
What that tells us is that the moment we started adding those lines the fillet was no longer able to be expressed and that's because the fillet radius is just a hair too large. So let's go ahead and just bring this down to 0.12 and see where that gets us. Okay now it's starting to show us fillets on all four sides.
That's just a little trick in case you find that your fillet isn't actually working. Chances are the radius is just a bit too large. We'll close it out with a green check mark and there we have it that hook fully created.
Let's go ahead and save our work. That is a new body so we'll make that green and save our work. Just to review at this moment you should have 169 solid bodies.
Now again a lot of these bodies are going to be deleted before we turn this into an assembly but for right now that's the number that we should be at. That's it for this video. Thank you.
In the next video we're going to start creating a play window to live in this space here.
