- [Instructor] Sometimes while working in SolidWorks
we want to replicate something like a chain drive
or a motion on a specific route, things like that.
The make path feature in the sketch can be very powerful
and a very easy tool to use to do that.
So really quick I'm just going to model up
two circles to kind of fake a chain drive really quick
and simulate this.
I'm going to sketch a line between the two
and I'm going to make sure that it has that tangency
between the circles, looks like I'm tangent
I'm just double checking.
Good let me use my power trim, trim that out.
Alright and I'm going to fix all of these in space.
So let's fix that.
Okay so now if I wanted to for example,
put a cylinder on this and it's got
a coincident relationship and I want to see this
move all the way along the path that's not really
easy to do, I can't take this circle and just
drag it and move it to the next thing.
I can make it coincident to that, but now you can see
because it's coincident to both I'm getting
all kinds of weird relations and things like that.
So another thing that you can do is make this a path.
So I'm going to just find the make path feature really quick.
Using the show command location we're going to find
where it's located.
It's in sketch tools, under the second options here,
make path.
All you're really going to do is select the entities
that make your path and what it's going to do is join
these together so that you can constrain an object
to them and it can continuously move about it.
So I'm going to go ahead and click okay.
Now I'm going to break this main, drag this out here,
and then I'm going to stick it back on,
make it coincident again.
And now drag it along.
And you can see that it's following along the geometry
because this is one path now.
It doesn't see it as four separate, you know,
line entities, it sees it as one path.
So very powerful tool and it can be really great
for doing stuff like dragging, you know,
simulating dragging parts along, checking for clearances,
especially when you're working with chains
and belts and other drive situations.
So remember the make path tool
which can be found under your sketch tools.