From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2016 Essential Training

Creating circular patterns - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2016 Essential Training

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Creating circular patterns

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- In this example, I'm going to be showing you how to create a circular component pattern. First things first, let's go ahead and open up 11.6.1 and 11.6.2. And I've just gone ahead and clicked on "Window", "Tile Horizontally". Alright, starting with 11.6.1, let's go ahead and click on "File", "Make Assembly From Part." And go head and click on "Okay." And create our first assembly. Now again, click on "Window", "Tile Horizontally" and grab this socket head cap screw and let's go ahead and just drag one of those into our assembly. Expand that out. And let's go ahead and mate the very first one. Click on "Mate". I'm going to chose the outside of the surface right here. Outside of that surface right there. Click on "Okay." And then, the bottom of the pocket right there with the bottom of the fastener. Okay now if I want to, I could do the same thing by clicking and dragging and bringing in a bunch more of those socket head cap screws and then go ahead and repeat those series of mates. However, that might take a while since there's 16 of these. So a lot better way to do that would be to create a circular pattern. Let's go ahead and click on the drop-down below Pattern and click on "Circular Component Pattern." As far as my axis of rotation, I'm going to chose the outside of this first part here. And then I'm going to choose the component I'd like to pattern which is going to be this socket head cap screw and then, define the angle. I'm going to type in 360 degrees and I'm going to chose "Equal Spacing" and then just go ahead and increase that number all the way up to 16. Now you've got a fastener in each one of those holes and we're ready to go. Click on okay and just that easily, I was able to create a circular component pattern It's way way easier than adding all those mates individually and doing all that extra work so definitely take a look at circular component pattern or linear component pattern. Whenever you have multiples of the same items, you just need to pattern them across your parts.

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