From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2018 Essential Training

Making your first CAD drawing - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2018 Essential Training

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Making your first CAD drawing

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- [Speaker] The third step in the Quick Start guide is creating a drawing from either a part or an assembly. You can see here I've got a part already opened up on the screen and I'd like to create a basic drawing for that. It's very similar to creating an assembly, you just go over here under file, make drawing from part, click on that, and as you can see here you get the option of choosing a template that you'd like to use. Now we've got some predefined templates inside of SolidWorks, you can also add a path to your own company templates if you already have them predefined, or you can save your own templates and then add them to this list. But to get started, let's go ahead and just go ahead and choose this C size drawing, click on OK, and SolidWorks is going to go ahead and open that template and give you a few options as far as the different views you'd like to bring in to that drawing. So let's go ahead and just drag and drop, so drag in the front view, just drag it over to the drawing, and there it is. And go ahead and notice that now we have this projection thing turned on. So anywhere I want to place that drawing, it's going to project this view over to the right hand side over here, this corner, below, any one of these views you want to place, you can. So click over here to place one on the right, this one will be placed down here on the bottom again, and so on. If you're done with that, go ahead and click on the escape key on your keyboard to turn projection mode off. If you want to make another projection, click on the view you want to start from, and come up here to projection view. It turns that right back on and then you can continue placing projections from the original view. Now, the cool things about drawings is pretty much all the work's already done for you, the part has been designed in 3D CAD and SolidWorks. We're just now showing what we've already drawn on this drawing and then adding things like dimensions and annotations to that part. So I can't actually change the shape of this part in the drawing. If you want to change the shape or the size of this part, you need to go back to the SolidWorks part mode, modify that part, and then your part will automatically update. Let me show you how that works. So over here if I click on that part, I can come over here and click on open part, just open the existing part we have. Now if I want to make a change, it's pretty easy. Go over here to that first boss extrude one. Click on the little drop down there, and click on that sketch. Now if I want to change the size of it, like the sketch, I can go ahead and modify that sketch. So instead of two inches, let's go ahead and change that to four inches. Exit out of the sketch, and notice the file automatically updates to the feature. The length's the same, however the part sketch changed so it got a lot bigger. Now if I head back over to that drawing, window, click on that drawing, notice the drawing automatically updates. Those two things are linked together, so any modifications I make on the part will automatically be reflected in the drawing. Now once I'm in the drawing mode, I can go over here to annotations, click on maybe smart dimension, add a couple of dimensions here as far as the size. Notice, it already knows exactly how big this is because it's four inches, because it's pulling the information from the part itself. We're just telling it where we want to place those dimensions, and how we want them to look. Keep adding a few more, how about from there over to here, maybe one from here to here, and we can continue on as we go around this part, adding dimensions and defining the shape, the size, the material, and so on. So those are the basic steps for bringing in a part or an assembly into a drawing, adding a few different dimensions, and then placing different views as needed.

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