Building Stair Heights and Defining the Second Floor with Reference Sketches and Planes in SOLIDWORKS

In this video, we're going to create a second reference sketch called our height sketch,  where we'll set the stair heights and the second floor height. We'll also create a plane for the first time, and we'll go back and modify a previous sketch. So what we have here is the sketch we had just created called the ground plane.

And then if I bring it up on the previous model, we can see we missed a few elements. We missed this center line here,  and we missed this 36-inch dimension, which is supposed to represent the width of the path that a child can move up and down the stairs, right? So let's make that change now. We do that by clicking on the ground plane sketch in the Feature Manager and going to Edit Sketch.

Let's go ahead and add those lines now. The first is this center line. Bring up a center line,  connect the side of the inner rectangle to the other side of the inner rectangle.

Now, careful not to snap to any of these vertexes here. We're not trying to create a reference,  so just snap to the side. All right? Now you can see this line is a little wonky.

It is not horizontal. I'm going to highlight it and create Make Horizontal, create that relationship. You can still move it up and down.

We want to establish this 36-inch width relationship. So I'll bring up my smart dimension, grab that line,  grab this bottom line of the inner rectangle, and set it to 36. The second thing we're missing is the width of this pathway here,  which is set by the side of this beam.

So I'm going to grab the center line,  grab that bottom right-hand corner of that beam, and connect it there. Escape gets us out of that command. All right.

Now, these two sketches should be identical, which it seems like they are. Beautiful. Let's go ahead and close this out and save it.

Now we'll create a second sketch representing the heights that matter most in our design. This is the overall height of the playground, the height of the second floor, and the heights of each of the stair steps. So first, let's go to a sketch on the front plane.

Go to Create Sketch. We're now facing the front plane directly. I'm going to use my scroll wheel to just kind of drag into a better orientation point.

There we go. Let's grab center line and let that first click be right on the origin. And you can see when we get about here, it says, do you want to make this vertical? You see that little yellow icon pop up? Yeah, let's make it vertical.

Escape closes out of that. Wonderful. Now let's create each of these stairs.

Well, first thing I want to do is either click this button, which is the Normal To button, or click N, because I want to face this directly as I make these stairs. Grab that center line again. Let's just create a box for that first stair.

It doesn't matter how big or small it is. Let's just create the box. Now I set this stair height at what seems to be the same width as the wider of the two boards.

And that seems to be OK. For smaller children, we don't need the full 7-inch rise. 5 and 3-eighths should do just fine.

We'll go to Smart Dimension, grab this side edge, click it, hit the equal sign to access the global variable for the wide board width. Green check mark closes that out. All right.

Now we need to make a pattern with that rectangle we just created. And we've done a couple patterns already, so this shouldn't be too hard. We know this pattern is going to have 12 instances.

Let's go to Linear Sketch Pattern. And as always, the first thing we want to do is grab the entities to pattern. This center line here, and this center line here.

Just like before, it's trying to prioritize the X-axis and create a pattern moving left to right. We don't want to do that. Let's bring this instance count to 1, and then go ahead and collapse direction 1, because we're done with that.

And working in direction 2, let's increase our instances until they hit 12. Just like before,  we want to make sure our pattern is moving the right direction, in this case, up for the stairs. If it's moving down, then go ahead and just click this button, the reverse arrow, and make sure that it's moving up for the stairs.

As before, the pattern instances are clustered together far too much. Let's go ahead and spread them apart a bit. In this case, type in 6,  close it out with a green check mark.

We can still move our pattern,  so let's go ahead and lock that in now. We'll grab this vertex, and this vertex,  and select the merge relationship. That takes two vertexes and makes them one.

They're merging into one. All right, here are all of our stairs. We'll close that out.

You may ask yourself,  why is it that these stairs are all different heights? Well, let's connect some vertexes until it gets the idea. All right, now it gets the idea. Perfect.

We now have the exact heights of each of our stairs. Great. I'm going to go ahead and bring this line up to make a nice little box.

Okay. Second thing is, let's establish an overall height to the second floor. I'm going to grab the centerline tool, grab that top corner of the stair, and just close it out here.

Use smart dimension to set this to 72. All right, perfect. It seems these sketches are identical.

Great. Let's go ahead and close it out, and we'll give it a name. In this case, we'll name it height sketch.

You can also name it front elevation, side view, whatever you like, just so you know what it is. All right. Next, we're going to create a plane for the first time.

Now, a plane requires three references. It requires a reference that references its X-axis, its y-axis, and its z-axis. To create a new plane, we'll go to feature tool, feature tab, reference geometry, plane,  and we could pick three vertexes and establish a plane that grabs all those vertexes.

All right. I'm going to go ahead and delete each of these by highlighting with the right mouse click, delete. For this particular plane, we're going to first grab a line, which gives us two vertexes automatically, thereby satisfying two of the three requirements in one go.

All right. Now, the reason this plane is a yellow ghosted line is because it's almost defined, but not quite defined. So, let's finish defining this plane.

It's asking for a second reference. For this, we're going to go up here to this little drop down arrow. This is our feature manager now moved over to the side, but we can still access the parts, which is great.

We'll click front plane, and you can see it automatically created a perpendicular relationship between our new plane and the front plane here in pink. That's actually the relationship that we want because this is the second floor. It's horizontal to the top plane,  perpendicular to front plane.

It looks good. A blue plane is a fully defined plane. Since we're satisfied, let's go ahead and close this out with the green check mark.

Make sure that you have the same references on your plane definition that I have on mine. All right. And we'll give that plane a name.

Let's call it second floor. All right. Go ahead and save your work.

And that does it for this video. In the next video, we're going to revisit sketch pattern to build the planks of the second floor. We're going to set the outside frame and set the inside frame, and then we'll finish by exploring the appearances tabs in SOLIDWORKS.