- [Instructor] There are many times
when we're working on pulley systems or chain drives,
and it's helpful to get chain length
or your setup figured out before you
really get too far into modeling.
Here, using the belt chain feature in the sketch entities,
we can do that without doing too much work.
Here I've got a simple sketch that just shows roughly
the location of my different sprockets.
You have to make each sprocket its own individual block,
this gives SOLIDWORKS the ability to recognize it
as a singular item, and create the belt chain between them.
If I go up to tools, sketch entities, and belt chain,
it's going to bring up the belt chain property manager
and you see here, we're selecting our belt members.
So I'm going to select one arc here,
and the other circle here, and you can see
automatically, it's created a belt there.
Now I can flip the belt.
I can also change the belt length,
right now it's giving me a readout of what I have there,
I can also set a belt thickness.
And also if I want, I can add other entities
and mess around with the different combinations,
and how the belt is strapped through everything.
So this is a pretty easy tool, but the main part is
you're going to want to make sure that each one of these
representative gears or sprockets,
is inserted as a block into your sketch.
You can do that by simply making a circle,
while it's selected go to blocks, and make block.
Hit enter, you can always go back in under edit block
and change its dimension whenever you like.
You see here now, if I right click on this,
I get all the belt options,
and my driving length,
right here.
So if I wanted to order a custom belt for example,
this would be really handy, and it also gives you
your length readout right here in the feature tree.
When you're done, you just hit accept,
and you've got that there for reference.
You can always go back and edit these as well,
move them around in any direction.
Oh, CTRL+Z, now you can see there you got to be careful
so that you don't cause it to pop out into nowhere.
But that's also going to cause your length to update
as you update this sketch, so if you have this sketch
driven off an assembly for example,
that could be very useful.