- [Instructor] Subassemblies are assemblies
of other assemblies.
Now right here on my screen I've got a subassembly
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 going to 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 be selected over here
'cause I only have one thing open.
Click on Okay.
And now that subassembly 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 as we'd like.
If I grab it here, click on this one here,
hold down Control, just drag out that assembly,
there you have it.
So now I have three of the individual subassembly.
Now, if you twirl 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, right?
So now it's just the part, not the entire assembly.
So if you do want to make a copy of the entire subassembly,
drag it over here from the list over here.
Okay, now one thing that's really cool
about subassemblies is if you make
a modification to that subassembly,
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 subassembly,
and then right over here on the right hand side
of the screen, notice there's the File Explorer.
And right up there at the top
you can see I'm actually in the Exercise Files
on the desktop.
This is just a quick way to get access to these files.
And the part I'm looking for here is this 11.4.0.2 washer.
And let's go ahead and just drag
that into this subassembly.
All right, now we're going to mate 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 subassemblies.
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 only one time to the subassembly
and it automatically shows up here.
Now notice this one up here did not get that washer
because it is not a subassembly.
This is just one part, so it's not related.
A good way to think about subassemblies is in real life,
how would you assemble these items?
And that's exactly how you should do it in a computer.
If you have five components, they 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 subassembly
and all that work will automatically propagate through.
This is how you can work with subassemblies.
It's great and powerful tool inside of SolidWorks.
Make sure you're doing it anytime
you're repeating an assembly more than one time.