From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2018 Essential Training

Building your first assembly - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2018 Essential Training

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Building your first assembly

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- [Instructor] In this quick start movie, we're going to be building our very first assembly. Let's go ahead and open up a few parts. So up here under the home icon, I'm going to come down here and open this 2.2 file. Then, let's go ahead and create an assembly from this part here. So a couple of ways to do that, but the first way I'm going to show you is go over under File, come down here and say Make Assembly from Part. That's pretty much the easiest way that I know to do that. By default it automatically selects that file, 'cause it's pretty much the only one I have open, and then go ahead and click on OK. It just goes ahead and takes that file and it puts it into my assembly. Now, this looks exactly like the part that we were just working on, except we're now in the assembly environment. So things are a little bit different. So once I have an assembly, over here, it shows up as my part. If you want to make maybe a couple of those parts, you can actually hold down Control on your keyboard and just kind of drag out another version of it. Now you can see I have two of that exact same part. If you're feeling fancy, go ahead and hold down Control, drag out one more, why not? You can drag out as many as you want. You can start building this thing however you'd like. If you'd like to create more parts or bring other parts in, let's go ahead and create one. Come up here to the New, click on the Part icon, click on OK, and let's do a little review. First thing I want to do is go over to the Sketch toolbar, click on Sketch, choose either the front plane, or right plane, or a top plane. Choose any one of those. Go ahead and start a sketch on that plane, which we're already in. You can see over here we have the icon here which is the exit sketch as well as cancel. That's how you know you're in a sketch mode. And then come over here and let's go ahead and create a circle right on the origin. Come over here to Features. Do an extrude. Let's go ahead and just drag that out, click on OK, and there's our new part. Now let's go ahead and save that part, so File, Save as. We're already working in this folder called 2.2, so let's go ahead and call this part 2.2-1. Click on Save, and now we have that saved out to the file system. Now what I want to do is bring that part into our other assembly. If you go over here to Window, you can click on Tile Horizontally, which allows you to see all the available windows that you have open. Now, what I can do is I can just click and drag and drop. Drag that part into the assembly. If you want to drag another one of these in, no problem, bring it in. Once you're happy with what you have, click on the Expand button, and now you can see, these were all the parts we have in the assembly, and I can start moving things around as needed. If you left mouse click on a part, it allows you to drag it around the screen. If you right mouse click on that same part, it allows you to spin it around. If you just click anywhere in the window not on top of a part, it allows you to spin the entire environment around. So holding down the middle mouse button, I can spin everything around just like I could in the part environment, and if you actually want to operate on an individual part, click on it first, and I can drag that part. If it happens to be the first one, it won't let you do that, but if you click on any other one, you can drag that around, right mouse click to spin that part around in that environment. Those are the basic steps for creating an assembly inside of SOLIDWORKS, and bringing in new parts or opening existing parts.

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