Sketch Entities - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

- Sketching is one of the most essential skills inside of Solidworks and inside of the exams we're going to be creating quite a few parts. And, so creating effective sketches using the tools is very important. So, let's go through and create this sketch here you see in the sample exam over here in Solidworks. Now you can see I have it kind of compressed on my screen and it's a little bit difficult to work this way. And that's why it's very, very important if you have the option to have dual monitors when you're doing the exam. Because you're going to have a question on one screen and you're going to have a full work environment on the other if you have the option. Otherwise, we're stuck doing what we're going to be doing here. But it's workable and so we're going to go through it and show how to do it. So click on new. And if you've already set up a template notice you'll have a templates icon at the top here and notice this part is made out of 1020 steels. So I'm just going to choose that. And I'm already going to be in the right unit. So here it is. Millimeter grams second at the bottom and I'm in Ansys 1020 steel so I'm ready to get started. Go ahead and click on sketch and I'm going to choose the front plane. The best way to start on a sketch like this is choose what the origin is going to be. So this hole here looks like a pretty good start for that. So I'm going to go up and choose circle. Draw a circle. And then I'm going to go ahead and choose the line command and start from the left-hand side and work my way around this PARC creating a rough shape. It doesn't have to be perfect. So let's just go here come down at an angle. Now we need a tangent arc. Notice there's a tangency showing up over here. So I can either choose the tangent arc up here or if I go out and back onto that line it turns into a tangent arc magically. So that's a quick little technique you can use to quickly jump from line to tangent arc. Then I go over across here come down at an angle and another angle. Now make sure you don't automatically add any relationships off the bat so make sure you don't click here and automatically add that relationship. So just a little bit off will allow you to do that. Go over to the straight line section here and then end that line. Let's go back on the other side, back to line and then another little 45 here goes across. Now we've got an arc we need to create so it's going to be an tangent arc. So I'm going to go back on here and then come back out as a tangent arc. Make sure I'm coming out the right direction which I'm not. Easy, there's where I want it. Then one more tangent arc off of that so it's going to be a tangent arc here. And let's just end it down here. So notice that didn't show up perfect, that's okay. Now I can grab this line here and just snap that onto there. Great. Now that's basically the shape. Now it's obvious there's no dimensions. It's not exactly the right scale but that's where we're going to start adding dimensions now. My overall is 32. So I'm going to say from the top to the bottom is going to be 32 and that should autoscale the rest of the drawing to be the correct shape and size. The hole here, let's add a dimension here of 14 and there's a 14 dimension from here to here. Okay. Notice I'm the way I'm laying out these dimensions. They're exactly the same way they are here in the sample exam. So we want to do that that way we can double check that our drawing looks the same as their drawing. So work your way around the different dimensions. And you can see this will just start taking shape as we go. I can say from here to here, 14. Now I'm not going to do this entire thing but I just want to show you a few of these quick dimensions. And I just add them and as we go around this shape we're going to be defining how it's setup. Couple of things to keep in mind. Make sure that down here in the section the 29 arc, that's kind of a tricky one. So we want to make sure we do show you that. Up here from here to there is going to be the 29. So type in 29 there, oops not 39, let's go back, 29. There it is, okay. Now notice that this arc is on that line. So notice that point right there should be on this line right here. So let's go ahead and say make coincident and that kind of throws our model off. But that's okay. We can recover from that just by pulling that back down. And we'll just drag this down here a little bit. And let's define this arc here which is 5 so type the 5 in right way and then give the dimension here of the 29. That will start making things look a little bit closer to what we're looking for. Okay. Overall dimensions. This one here, from there all the way to the other side here. That's going to be our A dimension. So the quick way to define global variables is to type it in here. Say equals and I'm going to say A and then click on this little global variable. Right, then just type the value in. So for A, I scroll up here I can see A is supposed to be 81. So type in 81 and there it is. And notice define with a variable now. Same thing on the top. So value B from the top to the bottom, I'm going to say, equals B. Turn it into a global variable and that value is 57. So 57, okay. Now our model is a little bit out of skew so let's just move this slightly to get it back to looking like somewhat we need. So that's why it's a good reason to kind of go around in order here and add in those dimensions the right way. So we'll say 10 degrees here. Make sure you're choosing that dimension correctly. So it's going to be from this line here to that line there, 10 degrees. We already have a tangency relationship here which is great. And we are going to add a 19 at the bottom so that's going to space this thing off correctly. So from here to there it soing to be the 19. Alright. Now we need a dimension from the edge to the hole. That's going to be the 14. Now notice as soon as we do that we start getting some black lines which means they are fully defined. I'm going to go ahead and add a dimension here. 45 and 7 for the heighth of that. Starting to look a lot better. The radius on the top is going to be 19. It's going to be 5 from here to there. 24 from the top to there. 24. And let's say it's going to be 19 from here to the top. Alright, looking pretty good. The last dimension we need to add is that 29. So now I have a fully defined sketch. So I want to make sure that as I zoom in here that I place most of my dimensions roughly where theirs are so I can verify that dimensions that I have in my sketch match the dimensions that they have in theirs. In case there's some problem I can always go back and verify this to make sure I'm getting the exact the same part they are. Everything is fully defined and I'm ready to go. So in this one I'm just going to go into features, extrude. And if you scroll down here you can see that's supposed to be C which is 43. And I'm going to create another global variable which is equal to C. Create the global variable in there and type in 43. Alright that's creating the first part and going through and creating that sketch. So again we're going to be using a lot of sketch entities, a lot of dimensions so make sure you're up to speed with all those sketch tools. Line, circle, and tangent arc are going to be the ones you use probably the most. But there could be a wild card in there that we're not sure of. So make sure you're up to speed with all the different sketching tools and go ahead and create a couple of these parts from the sample exam and make sure that you can go ahead and create that design pretty quickly in preparation for the exam.