- [Instructor] The weight of something
is defined by the volume of it
times the mass density.
Now, depending on the material,
obviously, we're going to have different densities.
So right now, if I want to weigh this kettlebell shape here,
I could come up here under Evaluate
and come over here to Mass Properties.
And you can see here, I get a mass of 9.99 pounds,
and you're thinking, "Hey, great,
I got a mass, so everything's good."
Well, it's really not, right?
Because we didn't define what material this is.
In fact, SolidWorks doesn't even know what material this is.
It says, material not specified.
So it just giving you some arbitrary number
which doesn't really help us out at all.
So I always recommend defining a material
when you're designing a part.
So a kettlebell is most time made out of iron.
So let's go ahead and apply a material called iron to it.
So come over here to Edit Material
and under Steel we can troll that up, come under Iron here,
and I've got the ductile iron or gray cast iron.
Let's use that gray cast iron
and go ahead and apply that, click on Close.
And notice the appearance changed.
So now it's kind of a black color.
It's looking more iron-like.
And over here it does say gray cast iron.
So now when I run the mass properties,
it should give us the exact weight of this kettlebell.
So under Mass Properties here
you can see now the mass is 71.92 pounds.
And it's saying, hey, the density
that I'm using to calculate this
is 0.26 pounds per cubic inch, right?
So that's important.
So you got to make sure that you're using the right density
to get the right weight at the end of the day.
Now, of course, the volume in the surface area
shouldn't change, because the shape did not change.
But if we make this a little bit bigger,
a little bit smaller,
then we'll see a change in volume, a change in surface area,
and of course, the final weight of the product
will be more or less, depending,
but we can also come back over here.
So cancel back out of that.
Now I want to also point out
that we have different options we can use here.
So even though we've changed the material here
we can also change the appearance
which we've looked at in an earlier video
as far as if we want to change the color,
I don't, maybe, you don't want it to be black.
So here's the gray cast iron,
here is the appearance, or the display manager.
And if I click on it,
I can say, hey instead of this color, let's modify that.
Or I can change something else.
I can say add appearance, or edit appearance,
or copy appearance.
I can use this.
So if I wanted to change it,
the dark's a little too light.
I want a green kettlebell.
When I click on that say okay.
Now it's still gray cast iron, right?
The material is still gray cast iron.
Here it is, gray cast iron, but now it's a green one.
So I just painted it green or something like that.
So you can apply materials and appearances separately,
but all those physical properties
that we've applied to this part
would be used for something like
if you did an FEA analysis,
if you want to actually use this
for some type of a calculation,
whatever materials here is the values
that are going to be used for that.
If you want to get in and measure things
and you want to use those mass properties,
we have a couple different ways we can get to them.
They're up here under Evaluate, we have Mass Properties,
but we can also add a toolbar to our user environment here.
So if I come over here to Sketch,
I'm looking for a big white area here
or a gray area on the top of your screen.
The Evaluate toolbar didn't really have much space,
maybe right over here.
So switch over to a ribbon that has a bunch of space,
right-click on that area and come down here to Toolbars.
We can also get to it over here, by the way, too.
Right-click over here and say, Toolbars.
And notice down here we've got a whole bunch
of options of Toolbars we can turn on, and turn on Tools.
And so Tools is another toolbar here.
It showed up right here at the top of the screen
and I can grab that and move it wherever I'd like.
Now look inside there. I've got the spelling tool.
I've got the measure tool.
I've got the mass properties tool.
That's the one I'm looking for.
So let's go ahead and just grab
and dock this over here to the right-hand side of the screen
which I actually like to keep it over there.
And I use this mass properties all the time, right?
'Cause I'm trying to figure out how much something weighs
or I'm trying to refine something
to make it a little bit lighter
or running an analysis on it
to see if it can make it a little bit stronger.
So that mass is very important to me.
So those are a couple different ways
that we can apply mass properties.
We can weigh our part
and really see what goes on behind the scenes
as far as how SolidWorks is using the material,
as well as the mass properties
to calculate the final volume, size,
and weight of your final product.