From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2022 Essential Training

Starting an assembly - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2022 Essential Training

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Starting an assembly

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- In this chapter, we're going to be building assemblies. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to take our parts and put them together into an assembly document and then we can rearrange them, move them and put them together using some of them different mates we'll learn in the chapter. From there, we can create sub-assemblies or we can yet add fasteners to attach components together. Let's go ahead and get started, building assemblies. Once you've designed several parts inside of SolidWorks, the next logical step is going to be to combine those parts together into an assembly. So to get started, we need to open several more parts and then we're going to go ahead and build an assembly from them. So right over here, I'm going to click on the file open, or you can come right up here to the top of the screen here and click on open right up there. And I happen to be in chapter 11, 11_01. And I already have this part here which is the 11.1.1 open. I'm going to open this next three here. So I'm going to hold down shift and select those next three parts. And then I go ahead and click on open. So each one of those should open up and then what I can do is go to window, tile horizontally, and you can see all the individual parts that happen to be opened up. Now we need to choose which one of these parts we want to be our original part that's going to go into our assembly first and then we're going to go ahead and drag and drop all the other parts into the assembly. Now this one over here makes the most sense to me. So I'm going to use that as my starting part. So I'm going to go ahead and open that one up full screen, and then I'm going to come under the file menu and then come down here to make assembly from part. Click on that. And it's going to open up these SolidWorks assembly mode and it's going to be starting with the open document that I select right here which happens to be that 11.1.1. And that's the one we do want to be at the starting point. Go ahead and click on the green check mark. And it's going to go ahead and grab that part and put it into my assembly. Now notice, here is the origin of the assembly and it takes the origin of that very first part and puts it exactly the same place. So those two things are connected together. And also notice right here that little F, that means it's fixed, that part is not going to move. It is locked to the center point of that assembly. Now what we're going to do is we're going to bring in a few other parts. So I'm going to go back up here to window, tile horizontally, and now we can see all the open parts. Now this part here is already in the assembly so I can close that one down. I'm going to tile it one more time. All right, now all I got to do is drag and drop. So click on a part, and then just drag that part into the assembly. Click on this part here and drag that into the assembly, and then grab this part down here and drag that into the assembly. Then I'm going to go ahead and expand that all out. Now, there's several different ways to bring parts into an assembly. That's one way, that's a drag and drop method. But you could also come up here to insert components. And you can see the open documents and you can bring those in that way as well. But there's a couple different ways you can do it but I prefer the drag and job method. If you'd like to have multiple copies, you can bring in as many copies as you'd like and then get everything oriented so you can start building the assembly. And we're going to be jumping into that in the next few movies.

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