- [Instructor] Once you've created your drawing
in SOLIDWORKS and laid out your model views,
it's time to start adding the most critical information,
your model dimensions.
This is how fabricators and other manufacturers
are going to know what to do with this part,
what the sizing is, what the tolerances are.
Everything will be included in your dimensions.
Now inside of SOLIDWORKS,
there's a couple ways that you can add these dimensions
and you have to think of them kind of like a mix
between annotations and sketches,
so for example, if we look up at the sketch toolbar,
we have the smart dimension button,
but then in the dropdown,
we have all the other dimensions that are available.
If I click on annotation,
it's also located here by default,
and you see smart dimension
and all the other dimension features.
If I go to tools, dimensions,
I can also see all of the dimension features here.
So you see, they've got them located
in a few different places under a few different toolbars
and a few different headings.
All of this to say
there's a bunch of different ways
that you can get your dimensions
and they all have the relatively similar properties.
So for this example,
I'm just going to use the smart dimension feature,
which we're going to cover later,
but I want to focus more on the properties
of the dimension itself, not the dimension style.
So when I open up this dimension,
one thing that you should notice
is that I have the smart dimensioning option clicked on
and I also have rapid dimension clicked on.
So this actually moves the dimensions around on the screen
so that they're placed more uniformly around a view.
So for example, if I click here
and start making a dimension, click a dimension here,
just start dropping dimensions.
If I click on any of these two half shells,
it starts moving the dimension over to a uniform location.
These two dimensions didn't go on uniformly
because I didn't click on the half shell,
but if I do that again,
you can see they're all out the same distance
and looking pretty uniform.
So that's how rapid dimensioning works.
The other things that you're going to want to pay attention to,
if we look at the properties and scroll down
is how we set our tolerances and precision,
so we hae several different tolerance options here.
I'm going to use bilateral, for example,
and you can also set the tolerance of that.
You can also set the tolerance of the dimension itself.
They can differ.
I would suggest trying to keep everything
as uniform as possible.
If you do start changing outside of the document tolerances,
you're going to have to come back here and know that
and change this back, if you, you know,
want to change all of them at once, for example,
so that's just something to note.
Down below, if we look at primary value,
you can actually override the value that's there
and put in some other value
if you want it to come up differently.
That is possible.
Again, I don't suggest this,
but if, for some reason,
you have to make a quick change,
no one's looking at the actual model,
it doesn't have to be to scale,
it's just a note on a drawing,
you might do this to get yourself out of a bind.
But typically, we don't want to use that.
We don't want to override the value.
We want to use our model dimensions.
One last thing that you can do
is down in the dimension text,
you can add notations onto your dimension,
so we can say critical, you know, right here
or I can say, you know, times two
or whatever multiplier.
They don't have an automatic multiplier for features
like regular dimensions.
When you're using whole call outs, you can do that,
but here's a place where you would add those kinds of notes.
They also have symbols that you can add down here, as well,
to add into those notes.
So for example, if you want to change a radius dimension
to a diameter dimension,
you can use the symbols down here and note that.
You also have the ability to use a dual dimension
if you want to do metric and English together, for example.
So these are some of the properties of dimensions
for the value.
You can also change the leaders.
There are various different options here,
but the one thing that you will want to pay attention to
is the bend length for the leader,
if you want to extend it,
and what type of leader witness you want.
Do you want them inside, outside,
or do you want to just use the smart option,
which is typically what most people do.
The last tab in the dimension properties has mostly to do
with the text that's there,
so you can change the fonts, the font size,
the scale, things like that.
If you have it on a different layer, for example,
if you want to show different sets of dimensions
on the same sheet,
you can use the layers.
This can be tied in here.
I'm going to go ahead and click the green check mark
to get out of it,
so that's just a general run through
of the dimension types.
If we go, again, to the dropdown here,
we can see that we have smart dimensions,
horizontal, vertical,
baseline, ordinate, and several others.
We're going to go through these in the proceeding videos.