From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2020 Essential Training

Working with subassemblies - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2020 Essential Training

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Working with subassemblies

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- [Instructor] Sub assemblies are assemblies of other assembles. Now, right here on my screen I've got in a sub assembly that's already been created, it's actually just called an assembly at this point and what we're going to do is, we're create an assembly of this assembly. So, come up here under file. Come down here to make assembly of or from assembly. Click on that. It's automatically going to selected over here 'cause I only have one thing open. Click on okay and now that sub assembly shows up into my top level assembly. If you want to make a copy of this entire assembly, we can hold down Control and drag out another copy right over here. In fact, we can drag out as many copies I would like. If I grab it here, click on this one here, hold down Control. Just drag out that assembly. There ya have it. So, now I have three of the individual sub assembly. Now, if you scroll down any one of these, you can see the components that happen to make that up. If you hold down Control and drag out a copy of any one of these it's only going to bring the part itself. All right, so know it's just the part not the entire assembly. So, if you do want to make a copy of the entire sub assembly, drag it over here from the list over here. Okay, now, one thing that's really cool about sub assemblies, is if you make a modification to that sub assembly, it'll automatically propagate through to your top level. So, let's go ahead and spin this around and you can see here we've got a bunch of these parts and I'm going to put a washer that goes around this component here. So, let's go ahead and open up this sub assembly. And then right over here on the right-hand side, notice there's a file explorer and right there at the top you can see I'm actually in the exercise files on the desktop. It's just a quick way to get access to these files and the part I'm looking for here is this 11.4.2 washer and let's go ahead and just drag that into this sub assembly. All right, now we're going to make that together, so I'm going to choose the outside of this pin and the inside of the washer. And then the side of this face here and this face here. Those are going to slide together. Click okay and now we're done with the mating. Now, if I jump back over into that top level assembly, you can see that washer's now been added to all three of the sub assemblies. So, that's going to save us a lot of work, right, instead of having to add those mates and bring that component in three times, you add it only one time to the sub assembly and it automatically shows up here. Now notice this one up here did not get that washer because it is not a sub assembly. This is just one part so it's not related. A good way to think about sub assemblies is in real life, how would you assemble these items? And that's exactly how you should do it in the computer. If you have five components that need to be put together first and then added to your top level assembly and you're going to do that multiple times, definitely build an assembly of those five components first and then bring it in multiple times. That way you can always go back and modify that sub assembly and all that work will automatically propagate through. This is how you can work with sub assemblies. It's a great and powerful tool inside of SolidWorks. Make sure you're doing it anytime you're repeating an assembly more than one time.

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