Building a Complete Playground Assembly Step by Step Using Subassemblies and Smart Mates

In this video, we're going to create our general assembly for the first time,  and in doing so, we're going to get all the necessary references we need to finish this wall here. All right, now normally when we create an assembly, we can go to File, New, and select Assembly and get going. But if we already have a part or a sub-assembly that we want to load into that assembly, we can simply go up to here in this drop-down menu for New and go to Make Assembly from Parts slash Assembly.

All right, now with this sub-assembly selected, click the green check mark. That zaps it exactly where it needs to be. I'm going to click this eyeball here.

Let's go ahead and save this. I'm doing a Control-Shift-S because I have that as my hotkey,  and we'll set this to GA001, and this is going to be the main assembly that has everything that makes up our playground. This is the highest level file that we'll be using.

Save our work. Now, since we're here, we can also load in some of the other sub-assemblies and parts that we've made. So let's go ahead and do that now.

Let's go to Insert Components,  and you know, for right now, I don't want to see these pop-ups, so I'm just going to go ahead and delete any other files that are currently open. Let's go delete that and stay in the GA for right now. Go to Insert Components.

Beautiful. The first is SA001, the slide. Let's bring that in.

Yep, we want to rebuild. It's asking us to rebuild because we made changes to the master part file, and we haven't had a chance to open up the slides since then, but now we can. Let's save our work.

Let's see what other sub-assemblies we can bring in. Next up, let's see here. We already have frame.

It's part of our deck and frame sub-assembly,  so we'll leave that alone. Let's bring in swing SA003. Let's go to the green check mark and watch it zap into place.

Perfect. Let's see if there are any other sub-assemblies we can bring in for right now. We did swing, deck, and frame.

Let's bring in the roof. All right. Go ahead and save your work.

All right. Yep. It's also saving any components that changed since we changed our master model.

All right. You can see this wall is incomplete. There's large gaps in there.

I'm going to go ahead and hide the rooftop sub-assembly for right now. Just highlight that in the feature manager. Click the eyeball.

All right. Now, just as before, we were able to edit a part within an assembly. We can also edit an assembly while in a larger assembly that it's a part of.

So, we can right-click on one of the items of that sub-assembly. We can do edit part. Let's see here.

Perhaps we go to the assembly itself. There we go. SA004.

Let's find it in the feature manager. Edit sub-assembly. All right.

Now, let's start adding some of the parts that we need to make this wall complete. For one, we've got this wall 005 piece. Let's bring that in.

And let's mate that into place. Put that surface against that surface there. Perfect.

Let's move this over here. That surface will mate against this surface here. Great.

And let's leave this alone for right now. Let's bring in some support panels. This is why I want to be able to see where the slide is because I'm going to set a support panel pattern right here.

So, let's go ahead and hide this outside wall here and locate one of these planks. Deck 009. Let's bring in a deck 009 part.

And let's mate this surface to the inside surface of this plank. Great. Set a coincident mate between that top surface and underneath the beam.

And let's set this surface against this surface. Great. Now, let's do a pattern.

It'll be a regular spacing that goes down but not so far down that it interjects with the slide. Linear component pattern. Components to pattern.

It'll be this plank here. The direction will be a vertical direction. Just pick a line.

And it's doing spacing instances. That's exactly what we want. We don't need as many as five instances.

Let's say three. And why don't we set the spacing to 12 inches and see where that gets us. All right.

That's sitting just above the slide. That's actually pretty useful. Let's see if we can add one more and see what that looks like.

A little too far down. Let's see if we can't bring this so it just sits above that hole. Great.

Why don't we set this spacing to 14 inches and a quarter. All right. Close that out.

That looks pretty good. All right. Now, let's complete the mates.

Set that and that in a coincident mate. And that completes that wall. Now, we did hide a piece here.

Let's see if we can locate that. All right. For right now, let's exit that subassembly.

And let's go into the subassembly itself. There we go. Looks like everything is visible.

Perfect. Yes. Let's save the changes.

I'm just going to locate that hidden component. Here it is. The one that looks ghosted.

Transparent. Right click. Show component.

Save your work. All right. I'm going to collapse some of these drop down arrows just to clean up my feature manager a little bit.

Let's show the roof again because we can now bring that back. Take a second to appreciate how far you've come. This is starting to really look like a playground.

One thing we'll do before we close out the video is add the second swing to this set. And I want to mirror it across the plane. So, we'll create a plane in this general assembly.

It'll be a midplane between that surface and that surface. That'll be a new mirror plane that we use. And we will mirror this subassembly.

Notice that it's capturing the subassembly and not the seat itself, not the part. It's capturing the component of this particular subassembly, not a component within that component, so to speak. All right.

Perfect. Let's go ahead and save our work. And that closes out this particular video.

Thank you. In the next video,  we're going to start adding the parts and pieces that make up our rope ladder.