Discover how to create a sub-assembly for a swing set. This step-by-step tutorial will guide you through the process of selecting the necessary components, placing them in space, defining their origins, and then patterning and mirroring the parts to complete the swing assembly.
Key Insights
- The creation of a swing sub-assembly requires the selection of the appropriate components, such as swing001, swing002, swing003, and swing004. Each part is then placed in space and fully defined.
- To ensure the pieces are positioned correctly, it's essential to mate their origin to the origin of the sub-assembly by mating the top plane, the front plane, and the right plane.
- Lastly, the components are patterned up to the eyelet and mirrored on the other side of the swing set. A new plane created from a vertically moving center line enables the mirroring of parts, resulting in the final sub-assembly for the swing.
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 create a sub-assembly that constitutes one of our swings in our swing set. All right, so starting from this first menu screen, let's go to File, New, and make sure that we open up a new assembly file. Beautiful.
Now let's start selecting the pieces that go into our swing, and we've got four of them here. Let's start with swing001, and then I'm scrolling out, and then I'm moving over to the green check mark to place it in space, and it should be fully defined, and it is. After we've done that, let's go ahead and save this document.
We'll save it as sub-assembly003-swing. All right, let's bring in the other parts. Swing002, and this should be the wire.
All right. Swing003, there we go. Save your work.
And swing004, and this should appear somewhere up here, and it does. Now, just in case any of your pieces didn't appear exactly where they need to, say this eyelet is floating in space. I'm gonna go ahead and float that for everybody else.
You don't need to follow along if it's working okay. Just watch. So this appeared randomly in 3D space.
We wanna mate its origin to the origin of the sub-assembly by mating the top plane, the front plane, and the right plane. We would go ahead and do that. We would first open up so we can view the planes of the specific part file in question, and we can also view the planes of the sub-assembly.
I'll grab the front plane of both, mate them together, the top plane of both, mate them together, and the right plane of both the assembly and the part itself, and mate them together. I'm also making sure that they're mating such that I don't need to switch the mate alignment. If that is indeed the case, and it may be for you, use your mate alignment toggle buttons to get it just right.
We want the planes facing the correct direction as they mate. All right. We should all be at this point now.
Let's go ahead and save our work. And instead of bringing in this chain link set again and again and again and mating it all the way up, we've already designed the piece in our master file so that we can just simply pattern it up to the eyelet. So let's go ahead and do that now here in our sub-assembly file.
We'll go to linear component pattern. And first, let's select the components to pattern. In this case, it'll be the part that makes up this chain link set.
Direction of the pattern, we need a line that's moving vertically. And there aren't any down here, but there does happen to be them. There does happen to be vertical lines in our eyelet.
So let's grab one of those. Oh, and wouldn't you know, it's actually patterning correctly. But let's go ahead and assume this is not patterning the way that it needs to.
All right. So first things first, let's go ahead and increase it so it gets pretty close to where it needs to be. If you're in millimeters, close out with a green check mark.
Set to inches, pounds, and seconds. Go back into local pattern. And then for this, type 4.75. There we go.
And that should get you to link just underneath, nesting in just the right space. Now it's just a matter of increasing instances until we make our way up to the eyelet. And again, since we already designed our pattern to function this way in our master file, it should land exactly where it needs to.
We zoom in. Yep, that's what we have going on. Great.
The correct number of instances in this case is 19, and that includes the original chain link set. Close out with a green check mark. Save your work.
Now all we need to do is mirror what's happening over here to the other side of the swing set. Currently, we don't have a plane to mirror about, but we can create one by first creating a sketch. Now, if we were, say, to highlight the right plane, we can go to sketch, grab a center line, find the middle of that swing seat, and create a center line moving vertically.
Close it out. We can go to reference geometry, plane, select that line, and then select a face for it to be perpendicular to. In this case, let's see here.
The right plane should do just fine. It's blue, so it's fully defined. We'll close it out with a green check mark.
We now have a plane about which we can mirror some of our parts. We'll select mirror components, make sure that our new plane is the mirror plane. And then for components to mirror, grab the wire, and then grab each of the chain link sets all the way up to the top, and grab the eyelet once you're done.
Close it out. And there we have our sub-assembly for our swing. Let's save our work.
In the next video, we're going to continue to create sub-assemblies in preparation for our general assembly.
