Completing Stair and Handrail Assembly in SOLIDWORKS with Mates, Mirrors, and Subassembly Techniques

Hello, in this video we're going to finish the stair sub-assembly. All right, let's click the sideball to hide all the unnecessary sketches. First thing we're going to do is grab this very top stair, stair 009, use CTRL to drag it from our feature manager, and this is going to become our bottom stair as well, only it's going to flip the opposite direction.

Let's grab this top surface, and this surface here, well that will rest. Click mate, but then flip the direction of that mate. Perfect, now this back surface is going to be coincident to this surface here, excellent, and this inside surface of that beam is going to be coincident with this surface of that notch.

Great, we'll close it out, that should be fully mated, we can't click it and drag it anywhere. Let's save our work. Next, let's mate all of these stairs.

So, first things first, we're going to need to drag in the number of stairs that we need. This is stair 010, and we need 1,2, 3,4, 5,6, 7,8 more. All right, we'll hold CTRL and drag in 1,  2,3, 4, and if you want, you can hold CTRL, highlight 4, and then drag 4 in simultaneously.

We can speed up the process. Now, as we know, with SOLIDWORKS, it's always best to get your items close together in the way they're going to mate before you execute your mates, to make it a little easier for SOLIDWORKS to understand what your intention is. So, let's use our view cube to go into an orthographic mode, and let's try to bring all of these planks in the same zone.

There we go. Shift, using the arrow keys, now I'm going to click and drag them more or less where they want to live. All right, there we go.

Bring this over here, bring this over here,  bring this over here, and bring this over here. Lovely. All right, now let's set these exactly in place with a mate.

Go ahead and save your work first. All right, first things first,  highlight that surface and this surface and click mate. It's going to make them coincident.

Perfect. Don't close out the mate box, just continue to make coincident relationships with each of these outside surfaces until each stair is complete. It is a faster way to get through this process.

You can see each stair moving into place as it's mating to the correct surface. Perfect. All right, next let's go ahead and place them on the board where they're supposed to live.

Wonderful. You can also click the enter key after you complete a mate to move on to the next one. It saves you the time of having to click the green check mark every single time.

All right, now let's connect that surface to this surface, this surface, and this surface,  this surface, and this surface. Perfect. Now let's tuck them back into place.

This one goes against this surface. These two surfaces are coincident. These two surfaces are coincident.

These two surfaces are coincident, and so on and so forth. Okay, let's go ahead and close out the mate box and save our work. Let's do the same thing with the handrails.

All right, we're going to be using this handrail here. Now we need one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight more. Let's highlight it to discover which handrail we're talking about.

Stair 007. Control, start pulling in eight handrails. Just like before, I'm going to highlight four at a time and pull in four at a time.

Great. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Looks like we have an extra one.

I'm going to delete it. All right, and then just like before, I'm going to get them more or less in the same zone like I did with the stairs to make mating them to each other that much easier. Okay, we'll put this one here, we'll put this one here, and then here.

All right, beautiful. First things first, let's make them all aligned to each other. We'll start the mate process.

There we go,  and I'm clicking enter once I establish my coincident surfaces. Oh, there we go. Perfect.

Now we can start mating these top surfaces, and then we can just probably grab this line and this line, make them coincident, and see if that works. There we go. Made it to the surface.

Close that out, and let's see how we can adjust these. Okay, they all need to nest. All right, here we go.

Let's do that now. This surface and here, let's move this over here. This surface and this surface will mate.

This one and there we go. That one. This surface and this surface.

Here we go, and that should cover it. All right, beautiful. Just to test, we'll click and drag to see if we can move them.

We can't, so they're all mated into place. Save your work, and all those in our steps perfectly fit our handrails, which is proof that the design in our master file was appropriate. All right, now what we need to do is simply mirror these handrail components to the other side.

Now, there's probably already a plane that exists that we could leverage from a previous part file or the master file, but let's go ahead and complete one in this subassembly. We'll start a sketch on that surface, connect a line from the inside of that beam to the inside of that beam,  find the center point of that line, and drag it down. Close out that sketch.

Make sure that we can see it. Highlight that line. Go to reference geometry, plane, and then pick a surface that it can be perpendicular to.

In this case, the top of that step will do just fine. All right,  let's hit the eyeball. Save your work.

Let's go through that mirror process. Now, if we go to plane 003, highlight it, and then go to mirror components, we can start selecting all the components that need to get mirrored. So the first is going to be, oh, looks like we're missing a mate there.

Before we do that, let's just make sure that we fix that mate. There we go. Green check mark closes it out.

Saving the work. All right, back to the mirror. Here we go.

The components we're going to mirror, I'm going to use my view cube to get a perfect idea. So not this one, but this one, this one, this one, this one, this one,  this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, and this entire piece here. Okay.

Okay, it looks like we ran into a problem. Yes, it mirrored them appropriately. We can see by the way that they're notched, but because of the direction of the angled cut on the top,  these pieces aren't going to work.

And there's really no way that we could mirror them to make them work. We actually need a left and a right version of these beams. And right now we only have one, a right version in this case.

Now we could go back to our master part file and create the left version and bring that in and do the mating process all over again. But there is a feature in the mirror toolkit in subassemblies that allows us to create that part just from the virtue of the mirror feature itself. I'll show you how to do that.

If we go to the mirror components feature that we just created and click edit, we'll go to this button that says next. And you can see it highlight, we can highlight each of the components and see which one it's referring to. We won't do anything with stair 008 because that looks great.

But for every other stair,  what we can do is click until we find the right mirror condition. Now again, there is no right mirror condition. We have to create the new part.

This very last button allows us to create opposite hand version. We'll click it. We'll go through each of these that need a left and right and set them to the opposite hand version condition of that mirror one by one.

And we'll leave stair 008 alone. All right. Once that's done, we'll close it out.

Okay. We'll click check. Check yes.

Check yes. There we go. It just created a new piece which it's placed in its proper spot.

If we highlight it, we can take a look at the name. Mirror stair 007. We have stair 007, which is this piece here patterned several times.

And then we have new part that it created called mirror stair 007. Let's save our work. Now let's try to open up a new file.

Look. It added mirror stair 007 and mirror stair 11, which is the bottom beam to that handrail to the list of our parts. It recognized where the original parts lived and placed them in the exact same folder.

So that is obviously very convenient for us. All right. This is looking pretty good.

Let's go ahead and save our work one more time. Let's open up our general assembly and watch it update. All right.

Yes. Rebuild. Okay.

Let's save our general assembly. And that's it for this video. In the next video,  we're going to finish out the general assembly by adding in our brackets and we will also add in our fire pole as well.