From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2021 Essential Training

Making linear patterns - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2021 Essential Training

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Making linear patterns

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- [Tutor] Let's learn about linear patterns. Now in this movie, what I'd like to do is grab this component here. I want to then take this little cone and put it inside there. And then I want to take this lit and I want to put it on top of there. Now, once I assemble that together, I want to then pattern that in each one of these little holes here, on the purple part. Now, before I do this though, it's probably a good idea for me to create a sub-assembly of these three components and then pattern the sub-assembly itself versus the individual components. So if I go over here to window and I come down here and say tile horizontally, you can see I have all the different components and right down here I've actually already created an assembly. So here you've got the base part. You've got the little cone inside and you've got the top. Let's go ahead and cut it in half so we can see inside there. All right, so there's my sub-assembly. Okay. Now let's head back over and tile horizontally. And this time I want to bring that sub-assembly into this assembly here. So I'm going to go ahead and click on it up here in the tree and drag that into my new top level assembly. Let's go ahead and drag this one over here. And then these three components, I don't actually want those. Let's go ahead and window over them I hit delete on the keyboard and that's going to get rid of all those components. All right. Now what I'd like to do is grab the assembly mode. Come over here to mate. Let's choose the outside surface here and the out, or sorry the inside of this hole right here. Let those mate together and let's go ahead and move it up a little bit and then choose the bottom of that, and go ahead and click on okay. So now I've made it that very first component which is actually a sub-assembly. Now you can see over here in the tree, if I twirl it up you can see here's my sub-assembly, here's my original part. Now let's go ahead and create that linear pattern. So under linear pattern which is right here, my first direction, I can choose either a face or a line. So I prefer to choose a face. I'ma choose this one right here. And as far as the component, I'd like to pattern instead of choosing it from over here, I recommend choosing it from this drop-down tree here and just choose the entire assembly. So here's the component of pattern. Choose that assembly. There it is. And then as far as the spacing I know it's four inches from hole to hole. So I'm going to go ahead and type that in there, and then go ahead and use the arrows to increase how many I'd like to make. And then those were going in the wrong direction here. So go ahead and flip that around, using this reverse direction icon. And we need one more. Okay then, for direction two we want to go this direction here, so I can choose either this edge here or I can choose a face. So I'ma choose that face, flip the direction as well. I'm going to make the spacing four inches this direction as well, and then just go ahead and increase that to more. And now you can see we've easily added all of those instances of that sub-assembly. Click okay when you're done. And just that easily, we're able to use the linear pattern. Think about how much time that would have taken if we had individually bring in each one of those, sub-assemblies or an individual parts actually and then made it each one of those. It can take a long time, so this is really going to save us a lot of time. Now if you want to go back and modify your pattern, come over here to the linear pattern click on it and say, edit feature. Now, for instance if you wanted to remove a few of these objects, right, I can go over here to the skipped instances box and then notice as soon as I click into that box, I get these little pink or purple dots that show up on each one of them. Now I can actually click on those little dots and I can say, skip it. Same thing over here you also get this option of skip it or modify it so you can modify or skip your choice. I'm just going to go ahead and skip and notice I can easily do that. And then those coordinates show up in here. So if you didn't want to, or you actually want to bring one of those back, click on it and hit delete which then brings that back into your pattern. When you're done click on the green check mark and there you have it. So, you can easily add patterns which are linear as well as circular, but in this case, we're just showing the linear pattern to your SolidWorks assemblies. And this case we're using a top level assembly with multiple sub-assemblies inside.

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