Completing the Playground Handrail with a Mirrored Feature and Final Touches to the Staircase Design

In this next video we are going to finish our handrail for our playground and in doing so we are going to make a mirror feature for the first time. So as you can see, we are still missing a handrail along this edge and something coming down this side of the staircase. Now regarding the staircase handrail,  we could recreate this entire body but there's already a lot of complexity built up within it so we might be better off just mirroring it over to the other side.

Now in a mirror sketch, if you can recall, we have to mirror against a line. When it comes to features, we have to mirror against a flat surface or a plane so we should create that now. We'll go to features, geometry, plane,  and let's create a width plane by selecting this inside notch edge, or surface rather,  and this inside notch surface.

You can see it creates a plane in the exact center of this stair step. While that's still highlighted, let's use it for our mirror feature. In features, we'll go to mirror.

You can see it's already populated the mirror plane as plane 11, which is the name of my plane. Yours might be named something else. We're going to mirror a body so we'll go down to bodies to mirror,  and in this case it'll be this handrail here.

Once you've done that, click the green check mark to close out the mirror feature. Save your work. Now we need the handrail to extend along and butt up against this surface here.

Let's go ahead and start a sketch on that surface. I'm actually going to hide some of the bodies that are in the way. I'm going to hide this one as well, and maybe I'll hide this beam and this beam.

N gets me back to normal too. I want my handrail to start on the edge of this beam and extend out a little bit. We'll have to remove this little notch here,  but we can do that afterward.

Let's go ahead and create that handrail to begin with. I'm going to use my previous handrail sketch as a reference. Grab a rectangle,  and we'll make a coincidence to both these lines.

Then we'll make this vertex coincident with that beam edge. Beautiful. Let's set this width to our wide board width.

You can see it's just shy of that beam. That's perfectly okay. We'll extend it all the way up to this edge here.

In fact, we'll actually go just beyond the edge. Now, for this, let's go to offset from surface. Now, what it's going to do is it's going to, once we select a surface,  offset, rather extend its extrusion all the way, but then stop either offset on one side or the other side of that surface.

I'll show you what that looks like. It's asking for a surface. Let's select this surface.

You can see it stopped short. In fact, it stopped short by this exact amount. If we were to hit reverse offset, it would extend beyond that surface by that same amount.

Let's set this instead to, say, half an inch. Again, if yours is stopping short, go ahead and hit this button, reverse offset. Uncheck merge result.

I think we're ready to close this guy out. Let's do that. Last but not least, let's trim this corner here.

I'll start a sketch here and make sure it is coincident to all the right points. Beautiful. Features, extrude cut.

Up to vertex is fine. I'll just select this outside vertex. We'll close it out.

Beautiful. I'll tell you what, let's go back and remove the portion of the board that sits underneath this platform as well. So, we can make that construction geometry, pull up our solid line, and just go ahead and build a nice big rectangle.

We want to cut that entire top off, as you can see from this handrail here. Once we've done that, make sure that that is a construction line. There we go.

That looks about how we want our sketch to look. Make that cut. Now you can see the handrail stops right at the bottom of that platform and the edge is flush to this edge here.

Great. Let's go ahead and add a chamfer to this platform. Let's color that platform green.

Beautiful. I'm going to re-expose the solid bodies that were previously hidden. I'll just hold control, not shift, but control,  highlight all the ghosted bodies, right click, and expose them.

There we go. And there we have it. Now, when we continue the beams along this pattern,  we'll take those beams in our assemblies and attach them here as well at the front of our playground, but that's not something we need to do here.

For right now, let's just go ahead and save our work and call the handrail done. In the next lesson, we're going to create the roof pieces,  and we're going to clean up our feature tree by grouping our features and assigning names to some of the more important features and sketches.