Designing and Assembling Flat and Angled Steel Brackets for Beam Reinforcement in CAD Modeling

In this video we're going to create some of the steel brackets that are going to reinforce our beams. So let's start doing that now. The first type of bracket I want to make sure I have in my assembly is a straight flat bracket.

So I'll start a sketch on this surface,  grab a center line, grab this midpoint, grab this midpoint, and grab the midpoint of the line,  and then I'll use the center rectangle to create that bracket. Let's give it a height of say three inches. Actually, let's go four.

There we are. And give it a length of 22 works. Beautiful.

And then for the extrusion, let's make it a quarter inch thick. Let's see what that looks like. All right, beautiful.

Uncheck Merge Result and close it out. We'll be adding some more of the bracket features like the hole pattern, for instance,  in a later video once we extract this body and make it its own part. So that will come soon.

That same straight bracket will connect this 45 degree angle brace right here,  but we don't need to remake it because we already have it made once. Let's make an L bracket. Let's come over here, start a sketch on this surface.

I'm going to use a center line to create, I'm going to use a central line to connect this corner to this corner, find the midpoint, drop it down, grab another central line,  bring it out here. Let's make these equal. Let's go ahead, highlight them, and make them fully black lines.

Oh,  actually, let's leave them central lines. And what we can do is offset the lines bi-directionally. There we go.

And since it's going to be three inches thick,  we'll want an inch and a half on either side. All right. Let's connect these vertices here and then set a general size of our bracket.

Great. And just like before,  we'll extrude this to a quarter of an inch and uncheck merge result. Great.

Now let's do a T bracket right here. We'll start a sketch on that surface. And again, we want to just find the center of where that bracket is going to sit so we can use that top edge, bring our central line here.

Here we go. And then we can grab another central line, bring it here, and then grab a third central line, bring it here. Highlight each of these three central lines and make them equal.

And then let's use a offset entities sketch one more time. There we go. 1.5 is what we want.

And we'll offset this line as well. Beautiful. Now let's just grab our trim tool and remove any of the excess aspects of these lines that we do not need.

All right. And then simply close out the bracket. We'll grab a line tool.

Here we go. Here we go. And here we go.

Now let's just set a general distance of one of these arms. We'll use this bottom arm and set that to 12. Let's see how that goes.

Better yet,  let's delete that. And just for the sake of design, we'll go ahead and make this line and this line collinear. There.

Now it looks a little more appropriate for us. Okay. Let's extrude this a quarter inch and uncheck merge result.

Great. We have our three flat brackets that we're going to use. Now let's create an angled bracket for all the interior support structure that we're going to need.

So let's do it over here. And for this, I'm actually going to create a mid plane and build the bracket on that mid plane. So let's go to reference geometry, plane, select the surface underneath this beam and the surface above that beam, and then close it out.

In that plane, we're going to start a sketch. Here we go. And let's just see if we can orient ourselves appropriately.

I'm going to convert this entity and convert this entity. Just bring them together like that. Highlight them both.

We'll make these ones construction. And then we will grab a new line to build our bracket and make sure that these lines are equal to each other. There we go.

And I'm going to make this four inches. Beautiful. Now for this, we actually have enough information to create an extruded feature.

Normally,  to create an extrusion, we need a closed sketch. It's not enough to just have lines. That's what's considered an open contour.

We need a closed contour. However, there is a way to create an extrusion with an open contour such as this, but it's a particular type of extrusion. Let's make that right now.

We'll go to features, extrude boss base. And it's already defaulting to what I'm going to show you, which is thin feature. And it's checking the box automatically.

And essentially, it's adding a thickness to this open contour and then beginning the extrusion. In this case, the thickness is defaulted to is 0.1. Let's make that a quarter inch, our bracket thickness. Let's change the direction by which that thickness expresses itself about this line.

Since this is made on a mid plane, let's make sure our direction one has mid plane checked so it can go both directions simultaneously. And we'll set our general bracket width at three inches. And there we have it, uncheck merge result.

And we're using the thin feature and our boss extrude feature tool. Great. That's it for brackets.

Let's go ahead and color them green since they are unique bodies. We'll select that angle bracket, L bracket, T bracket, and this flat bracket here. Save your work.

And that's it for this video. In the next video, we're going to start creating the features that make up a rope ladder that's going to live in this general space here. Thank you.