Creating Section Views and Dimensions for Playground Design Using Sheets in SOLIDWORKS Drafting

In this video we're going to create a new page and use that to express some section views of our playground. Here's where we left off with our perspective view shown here. It is its own page which it is named Sheet1 and then open parentheses to close parentheses.

Let's go ahead and rename this sheet. We'll right click,  click rename, and we'll call this Perspective. Let's rename Sheet2.

We'll call this Orthos. Beautiful. And let's start a new sheet and in this case why don't we just click Add Scene.

All right. Now it already recognizes that our GA is part of this drawing so it's giving that in our view palette which is convenient. For this let's go ahead and click a view.

Here we are. That shows what we consider to be the front although SOLIDWORKS considers that the left side of our playground. We'll click that and drag it onto our scene.

We'll hit escape because it's going to prompt us to create more projections. Let's make this a little bit larger. Let's say 1 to 50.

There we go. And let's move it up here to the left hand corner. Like before I'm going to click on the Go to View, Display, and do Tangent Edges with Font.

There. It's a little bit cleaner now. Go and save your work.

All right. Now let's go ahead and create some section views based off of this view that we see here. If we go to Basic Drawing Tools,  third from the left is going to be a Section View tool.

Now the first thing we need to do, well the first thing it's going to prompt us to do is select which view on that sheet we're going to make a section of. Since we only have one view on that sheet it automatically assumes we are making a section view of that particular view. In this case it's correct.

We can choose the direction of the section. Here it's cutting through the exact middle vertically. If we pick this button here we can cut through it horizontally.

We can cut through at an angle in which case we'd establish the angle by clicking one point and then another point. It's showing 45 degrees but we would decide that ourselves based on the points that we select. And then we can also create a section view that cuts in multiple directions simultaneously.

Let's keep it simple for right now and just do a horizontal cut. And let's place it above where our second floor begins. So let's maybe do something right around this area and we can grab one of these midpoints of one of these support beams.

All right let's go ahead and hit the green check to confirm that. Let's go ahead and click okay. All right now that we've done that we can place the section view above or below it.

For right now let's just place it below it. And what I want to know is are we facing the right direction in this section view. Now we could cut through this playground and be looking up to where we're seeing information say like the roof or this top beam or the second half of these chains here.

Or we could be facing downwards and be seeing the deck that we created and the stairs that we created. Well I can tell you right now we're facing the wrong direction. We're seeing the roof, the remainder of that handrail, that beam and so on and so forth.

But that's okay because we can alter that in our section view. You can click either the view line itself or the new view. I always click the new view.

And just click this button called flip direction. There we go. Now we can see our deck and our stairs.

We can see a cut through our fire pole, our swing seats so on and so forth. This is more informative to us. Let's go ahead and close that out.

It's also labeled that view section A-A and given the scale which is convenient. Now having done this we can go ahead and grab a dimension of say the width of this walking space. If we go to smart dimension.

Let's just grab this line and then connect it to this line and just drag it out. Here we go. If you haven't already take an opportunity to go down to this custom button and make sure you're working in inches pounds and seconds.

You can see that this dimension updated and the dimensions on your orthographics should have updated as well. There we go. Beautiful.

All right now let's take a section view cutting through the center of this shelter portion here. We'll go back up to section view and in this case grab the vertical cutting line and then pick a midpoint in this shelter. I'll grab the tip of this triangle here.

Close it out with a green check mark. Hit okay. And again you get to decide which side you want that view to appear on.

Let's move it over here to the right hand side and let's make sure it's facing the right direction. In this case I'd like to face towards the swing set and you can tell by the arrows on this section view that it's actually looking the opposite direction. So let's go ahead and click that view.

Flip direction. There we go. Now we can get an idea about how some of these walls are created.

That looks pretty good to me. All right we'll close it out. Let's take this opportunity to recompose our page so everything kind of lines up well and doesn't float off the page randomly.

There we go. Now let's go ahead and grab a dimension of the height of our second floor. Now we know these beams go underground so we don't want to grab the bottom of those beams but instead grab a line that represents the floor, say the bottom of the stairs,  and then grab the height of the second floor here.

There we go. Just pull it out. Lovely.

Once you've done that go ahead and compose your space as you see fit and save your work. All right that's it for this video. In the next video we are going to continue with auxiliary views available in our drawing file.