From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2022 Essential Training

Adding assemblies to drawings - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2022 Essential Training

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Adding assemblies to drawings

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- In this chapter, we're going to be creating assembly drawings. So the first thing we're going to do is create a bill of materials, as well as some balloons, and then add some drawing notes and relate how the components are put together and any other information that's required for building that assembly. Let's go ahead and jump on in. Once we have an assembly inside of SolidWorks, the next logical step is to create a drawing of that assembly and detail out which parts are what, create a bill of materials, and label and define all of the features and the components that happen to be in that assembly. So to get started, I want to show you which assembly I have open up right here. So I'm going to click on Open and head over here to the desktop, which is under exercise files. I'm in chapter 18, 18_01. And I have this example assembly opened up, and the very first file you see in there called SW2020-A1 is the one I have opened up, and that's what we're going to be working with in this video. Now, down here, you can see all the individual parts that are inside of there, so you can play with those if you'd like, but we are only going to be opening that top level assembly. Okay, it's already open, so I'm going to hit Cancel. And so here it is. Now, let's head over and create a drawing. So File, come down here to Make, well, there it is, Make Drawing from Assembly, click on that. Choose a template. Now, I'm going to choose the LinkedIn template that I have in the example files for you or the exercise files. But if you haven't set up the example templates, don't worry about it. You can use any template you have. Click on this one here, click on OK, and it should bring this entire assembly into our brand new drawing. Now, right over here on the right-hand side, you can see I've got different views that it can bring in. And I have a view called Side, and that's the one I want to bring in first. Let's go ahead and bring that in. And it's a little bit small, so let's go ahead and change the sheet scale. So I'm going to hit Escape first. Right click anywhere here, and come over here to Properties, so here's Properties. And I want to say instead of one to eight, let's say it's like one to three, make it a little bit bigger. All right, that looks better. And it's on its side, so let's rotate it. So click on the view itself, and then click on this little rotate view, and let's go ahead and type in, and here's that view right here. so I'll just go ahead and type in 90 degrees, and Apply and Close. Okay, so now there's our first view. And then let's go ahead and create some projected views from it. So I can project right over to here. I can project like an isometric, and even a top view, so a couple different views there. And notice if I hit Escape, it gets out of that command. And now I can move this around the screen, and everything is related together. Same thing over here, here is my isometric view. We can also add in if you're feeling fancy an exploded view. Notice we already had that exploded view in the assembly, so I can use that here. So what I want to do is grab this isometric view, hit Control + C to copy it out, and then right over here, I'm going to hit Control + V. I'm going to paste that isometric view, so it's exactly the same view, here it is. But instead of just being the same view, I want to explode this one. So I'm going to come over here to show an exploded or model break state, click on that. And there you have it, click OK. And now I've got all those individual components exploded out, so you can see what's going on in that assembly, and now we can add a bill of materials, we can add balloons, we can add all kinds of wonderful things to define this drawing a little better. Now, drawings for assemblies are different from drawings for parts. On a part level, we want to define exactly all the dimensions and the material and everything else, whereas in assembly, we're showing how to put this thing together. And if there's any kind of fasteners like screws and bolts and stuff like that they're going to put it together, if there's glue or special procedures. So you don't really want to add a lot of dimensions, but you could add some dimensions that kind of just show like the overall. So I could say like from the bottom of this thing to the very top of this food processor, how tall is it, right, or how wide is this? You could add those type of dimensions here just for heads-up information, or if a dimension needs to be added when you assemble something together, that also might be another dimension you might add here. But otherwise, we probably don't want to have a ton of dimensions on the assembly drawings. So anyways, that is how you bring in an assembly into a drawing and get a couple dimensions on there, explode out the views, and get ready to start adding in some build materials as well as some balloons to define which parts are in your assembly.

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