Completing Plank Patterns and Finalizing Deck Assembly with Efficient Mating and Mirroring Techniques

In this video we're going to complete the plank patterns of our sub-assembly and close out all the necessary features of SA-004 deck and frame. So I'd like you to open up your sub-assembly 004 and move it to the right hand side by clicking this arrow here. Then open up your master file and move it to the left hand side by clicking this arrow here.

Click into the master file. Now grab this blue bar and roll it up suppressing up to the body delete where we gathered all our unique pieces. Let's just take a double check at what these patterns are going to look like.

This unique plank is going to pattern all the way up as it butts up against this beam. This unique plank here is going to pattern this direction and stop here at this plank. This unique plank is doubled up here and that leaves us these two planks here which we didn't grab as unique pieces.

That's because they're not unique. Each one should be 35 and a quarter inches. We already have a piece that's 35 and a quarter inches and it's this support piece down here and it's made from the same narrow board with plank.

We'll be using that as part of our deck. There we go. We want to maintain the minimum number of unique pieces possible.

Now while we're here go ahead and click back into SA004. It says you have some changes in your assembly. What it's doing is it's recognizing that the master model from which all these parts came is in a rolled back state.

If you click okay or just sit and allow it to update you'll see it creates some major errors for us. I want to show that to you just in case this ever happens to you. We'll give it a second to update.

It is a lot to process. Right now it's processing processing every single part file in this sub assembly that is now being affected by this change in our master file. You can see that since we rolled beyond the body delete feature it isn't recognizing which bodies to keep and which ones to delete.

So every single part is now a representation of the entire master model. If you ever see anything like this the first place you want to go is back into your master model and make sure that you're not in a rollback state. I'm going to roll this back and I'm going to click back into the sub assembly.

I'd like to update. Yes. Don't click don't show again.

Leave that unchecked. Click yes. We leave that unchecked because it's a really good warning for us that some problems might occur.

All right now it's looking the way that it should. Just some food for thought if you ever run into that issue in the future. All right let's go ahead and close out the master file.

We don't need to save changes and we can discard the changes in the assembly. Basically anything different from when we first opened up the assembly we don't want to recognize. Let's just go back to its regular state.

Here we go. We can press this button here to expand it so it fills our screen. Great.

Since everything looks great just go ahead and save your work. Beautiful. It's right now saving every part in addition to the sub assembly.

Okay so let's begin these pattern features now. All right let's go ahead and go to linear component pattern. As always the first thing we want to do is select the thing being patterned.

In this case it's this plank right here. Select the direction. Basically any line moving in this direction here.

So I'll just grab this top one up here and then we could do spacing and add instances but instead we already have the pattern sketch laid out for us. Let's use this. We'll go up to reference and we'll pattern all the way until this line here.

Now I just want to make sure that I'm not patterning over a gap. I'm actually patterning up to a line. So I'm going to go ahead and select this line here.

That is obviously far too many instances so I'm going to start lowering the number of instances. I'll click this instant box. I believe we're somewhere around 21 so I'm going to type that in.

That's actually correct. Problem is it's patterning through the beam. We clicked the wrong reference or rather in this case it isn't recognizing what is patterning to that reference.

So let's hit selected reference and let's hit this side of this plank. Okay perfect. It's now shifted everything into place.

If that looks good go ahead and close it out with the green check mark. Save your work. Let's start with this next patterned piece.

Go to linear component pattern. As always select the thing being patterned first. It wants us to set a direction.

Pick a line that goes in the direction that we want to pattern. It's got the spacing right but again we're not using spacing. We're going to use references from the sketch taken from our model.

So let's pattern up to this line here. This notch cutaway we're going to save that for another plank. We're going to pattern up to this line.

We'll go to up to reference. Select this line. Not the gap line but the line above.

Then for selected reference just like before hit the outside surface. That's mating that outside surface to where that line ending reference is going to be. It looks good so let's go ahead and close it out.

All right now we just need to fill in the other pieces. First things first. Let's go ahead and close out the sketch or hide the sketch.

It's causing a lot of clutter. Take this piece and we're going to add another one facing the opposite direction in this general area. So this is deck 015.

Grab it from the feature manager holding CTRL and just drag it out. Let's go ahead and start mating in place. I'm going to make sure that these faces are in alignment.

Great. I'd like this face and say the face of this beam to not be coincident. Let's make them parallel and it's still facing the wrong direction so I'm going to click this reverse arrow.

Okay let's just close it out right now and just get it generally in the place where we want it to be. Okay all right now I want to mate this inside face of that notch to the face of this beam. So let's do that now.

Perfect. Let's close it out one more time. Let's get this just right.

I'm going to click this face and mate it to the face of the beam like so. Perfect. Your model should look like this.

Let's go ahead and close it out. Now we need to add those extra two pieces over here and back here as well and it's going to be this piece here deck 009 that does that for us. So let's go ahead hold CTRL click and drag it from the feature manager into our graphics area.

And let's go ahead with the easy mates first. We know that these faces are going to be coincident to each other. Make sure they're not facing opposite directions.

We'll need to hit that directional arrow so they're actually in proper alignment with each other. Okay I also like to use parallel mates a lot. It helps me just get a clear idea of what I'm making before I commit to any coincident mates.

I'll select parallel here and close that out completely. Let's just go ahead and just kind of move this where it needs to be. This is going to help us in our mating moving forward.

Alright now that we've done that I'm just going to grab this inside face of that plank this inside face of that beam and make them coincident to each other. Close that again and see how else it needs to mate. Okay we're just going to go ahead and bring this all the way to the edge.

Alright so we'll make this surface to this surface. While we're here let's just double check to make sure the gap looks appropriate. It looks the right size but I'm going to grab a quick measurement.

Alright eighth inch that's our gap. Alright let's see if we can't bring another board and place it here now. So that's going to be again deck zero nine.

So I'll grab that from the feature manager. Alright there it is and let's do the oh looks like we got two of these guys. I'm going to delete this guy just by pressing the delete key.

One deck piece at a time. I'm going to grab that face grab this face make those coincident. Again they're coincident but they're facing each other so I'll just hit this directional arrow to make sure they're actually flush in the right direction.

Hit the green check mark once and let's create a parallel relationship so we can start to align this piece appropriately. We'll do parallel instead of coincident and I'm going to close it out twice with the green check mark and just place it more or less where it needs to be. Sometimes when you have a lot of pieces in your assemblies you want to be very careful and systematic about how you mate because it's very easy to make incorrect mates and get yourself bogged down in a situation.

That just makes things a little more difficult. Alright now we just need to mate this last face to this face here and then that should close that out. Alright if you need to go back and edit your mates go ahead and do so but at this point this is what you should be looking at.

Once you get there go ahead and save your work. Now I have a feeling that we can just go ahead and create a mirror instead of having to mate two more planks. Let's do that now.

Lucky for us we can create mirror planes or planes in general in an assembly as well as a part. Let's go to reference geometry plane and we're going to create a mid-plane so we'll grab this face and this face creating a mid-plane between the two. With that plane still highlighted let's go to mirror components.

Select this plank here and this plank here close it out the green check mark. Perfect it has populated exactly where we need it to be. Alright this is a great place to save your work.

I'm closing out some of these arrows cleaning up my feature manager. Now all we need to do is finish filling in all the support pieces that are still missing. So I can tell that this support piece needs to be on the opposite side as well.

So let's go ahead and do that now. That's deck 009. I know that this bottom face and the bottom face of this support piece are going to be fully coincident to each other.

Just make sure the directional arrows have them aligned not facing each other. There we go. Let's kind of move that generally where we want it to be.

I know that this inside face and this inside face of this beam are going to be coincident. Then because support it's a support piece we're going to nest it as far back as we can face-to-face on that outside border piece. Alright that looks good.

Let's close it out the green check mark. Save your work. Anywhere else needs support? Here we go.

Oh right here. Okay and looks like we already have a piece that reflects what that's going to look like. That's deck 0010.

Hold CTRL, grab it from your feature manager, drag it in. Go to mate. The bottom face of that plank and the bottom face of that plank are going to be coincident.

Close it out. This is going to, let's go here first, grab this outside small face here and then grab this inside beam face. Make them coincident and then grab this inside large face there on that plank and bring it all the way back to the inside face of this outside frame piece.

Alright beautiful. Close out the green check mark. Go through, look through your model,  make sure you got support pieces in all the areas that they could possibly live.

Alright now the reason that we brought the frame into this assembly instead of just making a deck sub-assembly all on its own is because we needed to use the frame pieces to help mate our deck sub-assembly. It made things so much easier that way. Not only that but we're starting to kind of group our sub-assemblies into like sub-assemblies, into certain categories.

In this case this is an expansion of what would otherwise be just the general frame of the playground. We're adding to it, we're making it more complex and so putting sub-assemblies and sub-assemblies kind of helps build that logic into our design. Once you have this, close it out by selecting control save and save your work and that's it for this video.

In the next video we're going to gather all the pieces that make our roof and bring them together in a sub-assembly of their own.