- [Instructor] If you're building any type
of welded assembly using off-the-shelf tubing
like rectangular steel tubing, or channel, or I-beams.
It doesn't matter if it's aluminum or steel,
or whatever shape you want,
you can even even be using wood
or any other material out there.
As long as it's an off-the-shelf material
that you can create or buy,
or maybe it's even an extrusion you're creating custom,
you can use what's called the Weldment package
inside of SolidWorks to quickly create these type of frames.
And it's a multi-body part inside SolidWorks.
And let me show you how it works.
So if you head over here to the Weldments toolbar,
if you don't see the toolbar here,
right click anywhere up here on any of the toolbar tabs
and choose Weldments.
If you don't see it and if you start here,
just right click on it, Tabs, come over here to Weldments,
and there you have that toolbar.
So to get started we need a sketch
showing where the lines are going to be.
They're going to create the individual segments
of the tubing, so I have that right here.
It's just a regular sketch on the...
looks like the top plane here, okay?
Now, the first thing I want to do is turn on Weldments.
So make that active, so now we've added a Weldment
to our design, and then go over here to Structural Member,
and I can choose either inch or ISO.
I can choose one of these styles of material
whereas angle iron, channel pipe, rectangular tube.
And this is just a very small subset of what's available.
You can actually download a whole bunch of things
from SolidWorks with a lot more of the Weldment profiles.
You can actually even create your own Weldment profiles.
And you can import Weldment profiles from extrusion vendors
and things like that, and bring those in, like 80/20
or Bosch extruded aluminum, those are available as well.
So you can go download those
and add them to your Weldment profile.
And, in fact, I teach a course on SolidWorks Weldments,
which shows you how to do that, so if you're interested
in using the Weldment package a little bit more
and want to dive in a little deeper,
definitely take a look at that course.
Okay, so once I have this selected up over here,
let's go ahead and just choose one of these segments,
and you can see here it drops that profile right on there.
If you don't want to use the center point,
we can switch that to something else.
And click on the very bottom here, called Locate Profile.
I'm going to choose that point right there.
And that's going to go ahead and put that right on the edge,
and that's what we're looking for.
Once you have it located, then go ahead
and choose the other segments, so click over here
back in that group and choose the segments
that build up this profile, okay?
Now, notice over here we've got these butt joints happening
so it's got an open tube on one end,
and it's butting up to the other one,
and you probably don't want it in that fashion, right?
You either want to have like a long section here
with two shorter ones, but you don't want it
in this orientation here so you can switch these connections
by clicking on these little pink dots.
And notice what happens here, I can choose,
oh, I want to go from that style or I want to do this style
or I want to do a miter, right?
Couple different options there, click OK.
So that is only changing that one corner, right?
So there's a miter joint there.
Now, if you want to make a miter joint over here, no problem.
Same thing, click over here, click on miter.
And then come over here again, click on miter.
Okay, and then same thing over here, click on miter.
All right, so that's what we have.
Now, if you want to create another piece in here,
you can actually create what's called a new group.
So click on another group.
Choosing the same material is fine.
Then choose something like this line right here.
And notice what happens is it drops another piece in there,
starting from the line.
Of course, we want to locate that one
slightly different, right?
So click on Locate Profile, and I don't want to use
the center point, but I would like to use
this point right here, so that's going to move it up
so it's right in the center, and it looks pretty good.
Click OK, and there is our profile.
So everything looks pretty solid.
From there, again, I go into a lot more detail
in my Weldments course, but this is great thing
to get started and show you what's available.
And there's all kinds of things you can do
as far as like end caps and gussets
and weld beads and things like that.
But, again, we don't have time to do it all in this course.
I just want to show you what's available
and some of the basic ways to get started using Weldments.