Discover how to use the move copy bodies command to efficiently set handrail beams nested within stair steps. The walkthrough educates on the process of copying and moving bodies, as well as aligning and adapting them using mates and extrude boss base features.
Key Insights
- The move copy bodies command is an essential tool for duplicating and relocating bodies in a design. It can be found in the command manager or via the search bar.
- Alignment and precise positioning of bodies can be achieved using mates, which allow the user to specify exact locations for bodies to nest against.
- The extrude boss base feature can be used to add to an existing body, merging them into one. However, it's important to ensure that it doesn't inadvertently merge with unintended bodies.
This lesson is a preview from our SOLIDWORKS Certification Course Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in this course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
In this video, we're going to use the move copy bodies command for the very first time to start to set handrail beams nested in between our stair steps. All right, so I want to take this green body here and make a copy of it and move that copy down so that it nests between this stair and this stair and is flush with the bottom of this second stair. So let's do that now.
The command we're going to use is called the move copy bodies command. Now, if we go to the command manager at the very top and go to the features tab, I have that set here as a command that's easily accessible. You may not have that.
If that's the case, go up here to the search bar, begin to type in move copy bodies, and you'll see this tool right here. Simply click it, hold it, and drag it onto your command manager. This will be a button that we use more than once, and it would really help you to have it easily accessible in one of your tabs.
Once you've done that, activate that particular function. It's going to ask us what body we wish to move and or copy. In this case, it's this beam right here.
Now, we have this box that says copy checked, which means no matter what we do, we are making a second version of that beam. If we just close this out with the green check mark, it's telling us you didn't move this body anywhere. You're just making a copy.
Is that all you want to do? We click okay. There are actually now two beams that are exactly like sitting on top of each other, even though we only see one. There are actually two here because we just made the copy.
All right, so I'm going to highlight move copy body and edit the feature. I actually do want to move this in another direction. Now, if I were to use these arrows, I could pull it out here.
I could pull it out here. I could rotate it along an axis if I so choose, and if I were to close it out, I would see that it keeps the original, makes a copy, and moves that copy in the manner that I dictated to do so, but that again is not necessarily what we want to do. We'll go back into move copy bodies, edit the feature.
Here we go. I'm going to eliminate this angle here. In fact, better yet, let's go ahead, delete this feature altogether, and let's start one from scratch.
Move copy bodies, select this body, make sure that the copy box is checked, and close out this first feature. We'll hit okay. Let's go to move copy bodies again.
We don't need to have this checked, but instead, let's go down to the bottom to constraints. Now, let's select one of the bodies here, and for this, we're going to nest it in a very specific location, and we do that with something called mates. If we go to mate settings and we highlight that box, we can start to establish what those mates are going to be.
The first of those mates will mate this outside surface, so click on this surface, and nest it up against this inside notch cut that we have on this second stair step, and you can see that it immediately moved that body, so it aligns perfectly with that surface. All right, now we're not quite done, so don't click the green check mark, just click add to add that mate. We now have the option to make another mate, so let's do that.
I'm going to click this bottom surface of the rail beam, click the bottom surface of that bottom stair, and add that mate as well. That actually looks like where I want it to be, so let's go ahead and close it out with this green check mark, and you can see it created a brand new body and placed it right where we want it to be, but there's one problem. This body that we made a copy of had a notch cut out because it was resting on this outside frame.
Let's go ahead and add that back in. We'll go ahead and start a sketch on this face, grab the corner rectangle, grab this corner and this corner, escape gets you out of that command. All right, looks like that'll fill in that space quite nicely.
Go to features, extrude boss base. We'll extrude up to a vertex. Now, for the first time in this course, we're going to leave merge result checked positive, right, because we want to add to this current body and have them be fused into one, but here's the thing.
We don't want it to fuse to this stair, and we don't want it to fuse to any other body that we don't intend. We'll go back to the bottom to auto select, highlight this box, and select just this beam. Close that with a green check mark, and you can see that it just fused itself to that beam.
Perfect. Save your work. This is a good time to double check the number of solid bodies, which we have.
It's 110. Beautiful. Thank you.
In the next video, we're going to discover the chamfer tool for the first time. We're going to create the supports for our stairs, and we're also going to use split line to separate those into panels.
