Creating offset geometry

- [Gabriel] The Offset Entities command is one of the most powerful ones that we have available to us in the Solidworks sketching tools. I use this one all the time, and let me show you how to use it. First thing I want to do is come up here to Offset Entities, click on that one there, and define how far you want to offset your line. Now notice that I have over here a couple options as far as adding dimensions, adding reverse, doing a couple things here I want to change, but before doing any of these things, let's go ahead click on an entity. In this case here, I've got this circle, and you can see here I am offsetting it by .1.

If I type in .5, it moves it out by .5. If I click on Reverse, it puts it to the inside. I can click on Select Chain, but in this case there is only one circle, so I don't need to select the entire chain. Bi-directional will push it back to the outside as well. And I can also switch the geometry in the beginning, like Construction geometry or Base geometry, into Construction geometry. So I can switch this now to a construction line. Once you have the shape you're looking for or the offset you're looking for, go ahead and click on the green checkmark, and there is our offset.

Notice we've got a dimension here and we have a dimension over here. If you want to change these in the future, just go ahead and type in a value, and it'll automatically adjust those on the fly for you as well. If you choose something like a line and you say Offset, notice we can offset in both directions. We also have the option to add end caps. If I click on an end cap checkmark, I can either choose to cap it with an arc or a line to create another shape very easily, very similar to a slot command, but you can start with just a regular line, and then offset it to create whatever shape you need.

Alright, down over here, let's choose an entire shape like a slot and say Offset Entities. Of course it chooses that because I have the Select Chain turned on, it'll select the entire chain. If you didn't want to select the entire chain, you can just choose an individual line, like a line like this one over here, Offset Entities, turn Select Chain off, and it's only going to give me that one line, switch Bi-directional off, and maybe switch it over here to Reverse so it's putting it on the outside. I can just offset that one line if I wanted to. So I have a whole bunch of different options of how you can use this tool, whether you want to create the original base geometry and change it over to be construction or not, whole bunch of things you can do, you can even create slots very easily using this tool.

So this is definitely a tool you want to be using quite a bit 'cause it will save you a huge amount of time, versus having to create all those sketch entities again from the start.