- [Instructor] In this movie,
we're going to do a quick start assembly.
Now I'm not going to cover every single detail
to create an assembly, but I'm going to cover the basics.
What it's going to take to grab some parts
and build an assembly inside of SolidWorks.
To get started, let's go ahead and open a part.
I'm going to click on Open and I'm in chapter two.
And I'm going to go ahead and choose this first part here
which is 2.2 dash one.
Click Open.
Ad there's the same part
what we created in the quick start part movie.
And now we're going to use that to create an assembly.
So to do that, it's really straightforward.
Come up here to File and say, Make Assembly from Part.
It's going to take that part
and put it into our brand new assembly.
And here we go.
So it chooses that part right there.
Click on the green check mark.
And all of a sudden,
it brings that part into the assembly environment.
Now notice the environment changed, right?
Instead of having tools to actually create sketches
and features and stuff like that,
now we have things like mate or linear pattern.
This is the assembly environment
that's designed to put things together
or add more components.
Now, if you really like this part here
and you wanted a couple of those in there,
it's pretty straightforward to add one more.
I can come over here and say,
I can add another one if I'd like to,
but if I already have one in the assembly,
if I hold down Control on my keyboard
and just drag one out from the feature manager here
or actually just from the window, just click on a part,
hold on Control and just drag out one,
I can easily create duplicate gets of my original part.
Now, what if you wanted to add in some more parts, right?
So you could say Insert Components.
If it's not showing up here
in the open documents folder, click on Browse.
And I'm going to browse to this part here
which is 2.2 dash two, all right.
Here's another part.
And hey, I can just drag one of those in there.
If you want a couple of those, no problem.
Hold on Control, drag out another copy.
And you can add as many parts
as you'd like to your assembly.
Now, again, I can spin my assembly around
just like it could a part by holding
on the middle mouse button, rotate the entire thing
and that's rotating all those parts as an assembly.
Now, if you want to move an individual part,
click on that part and then drag it around.
If you want to rotate that part itself,
right click on it and you can rotate the individual parts
with the right mouse button just by holding it down.
Same thing with any of these other parts,
just rotate them by holding all that down.
If you hold down the middle mouse button,
it rotates everything.
And if you zoom in, zoom out,
you can use that scroll wheel to do so.
So a bunch of different options
for how to navigate inside of the 3D space.
Now, at this point, we're going to start creating some mates.
And mates are relationships
that connect one part to the next.
Let me show you a really basic one.
Right over here under Mate, click on that.
We've got a whole bunch of options
for how we want to mate things together.
Now the best way to think about a mate
is just think about how you want to connect things together
and just say it out loud.
And that's generally how you would choose a mate.
So saying this out loud, I'd say, hey, this little hole here
and that hole there, that would make a lot of sense
to mate those two things together.
So just choose those two things.
Choose that one there and choose that one there.
And notice they slide together
and it automatically selects concentric.
So it's saying, hey, more than likely
because you chose two circles or sorry,
two cylinders that you probably want to make those concentric
and you say, yeah, actually I do.
Click OK, and now we've added that first mate.
Go ahead and click on OK.
Now I can slide this up and down now, right?
Up and down, but I can't move it right or left.
I can spin it on that axis, but it's locked.
So now I have that section locked together.
If you want to add one more mate,
this time, let's say how about this face here
and that one there?
And because those are coincident.
It automatically chooses it and click OK.
Now I can't.
Actually I can slide 'em up and down,
but now I can't rotate 'em
because it's been defined a little bit further.
So I've less degrees of freedom.
Now, what if you want to make that face
and this other one down here touch,
again it's going to be one more mate.
And in fact, you can choose those faces ahead of time.
Choose that face there, spin them all around
holding down the middle mouse button,
hold on Control, choose the other one.
And as soon as I let go of that Control key,
I get that little popup window there.
Let me show you one more time.
Click over here, spin it around, hold on Control,
and then let go and notice I get this popup window
and right there I have mate, I can click on that.
It automatically chooses coincident mate,
click OK,
and now we've mated those components 100%, right?
They are fully defined.
They've got three mates.
So it's defining it in all three axes
that it could rotate or move in.
And that's pretty much all there is
to creating and assembling a solid in SolidWorks.
We're going to be getting into a lot more of this
in a lot more detail as we go through the course
but those are the basics
for getting started by grabbing some parts,
putting 'em together and adding some simple mates.