Drawing creation

- [Instructor] Making drawings of your newly-created pipe routes is important for looking at all the required pipe lengths next to each other in the bill of materials, as well as recording important details about your route. Let's look at some of Solidworks' tools to help make the creation of this drawing a bit easier. To start off, let's make sure we're on the piping tab at the top, since we're doing some drawings of piping. I'm now going to go ahead and select whichever route assembly I would like to create a drawing of. For me, I'm going to create a drawing of our top center route.

So I'm going to go ahead and click that. And now, you'll notice that because our tank is included in the sub assembly, this is also going to be part of the drawing that we generate. So now that we have our sub assembly chosen, I'm going to go up to pipe drawing up here in the center of our top bar. I'm going to click that, and now what you'll see pop up on your screen is a file that contains just your sub assembly. It may look like a blank screen depending on where in your assembly this sub assembly was placed, so just zoom out and then you can find your specific sub assembly that's in this file.

Now, when you go over to the left, you can select whatever sheet format template you want. We'll keep this one as is. Select OK. If you have any different bill of materials templates, you can also pick that. We're going to include auto balloons, and show the route sketch in our drawing, however, feel free to not include this if you do not want the line that goes along the center of these pipes included in your drawing. After you're happy with the options, go ahead and click the green check mark, and select OK. And now you will definitely have this come up.

It'll say the bill of materials template has no length field for pipes, would you like to add that now? I would definitely recommend it because this will allow the inches, millimeters, whatever units you're using length of every single one of your pipes you've used to be displayed in your bill of materials which is immensely useful for looking at how much material you actually need. So I'm going to go ahead and select yes. And now, you'll notice that over here, we have a column specifically called out for length, and when you go over here, you can see which pipes that's corresponding with.

Now, it will default to adding this view here, the isometric view, along with, because I selected that option, our auto bubbles, and some of our dimensions which you can drag around just like any other normal drawing. Now, just a note, if you did have a covering on your pipes, that would also be called out as an additional item number on the base with the length of covering that would also be needed for that pipe. Now, just like any other drawing, many of the tools are the same. You can also add a standard 3 view.

You can click on whichever one you would like to add in a drawing of. We're going to select our top center route again, since I wanted to add some non-isometric views of that, and click OK. And now that'll be auto added onto your drawing, and you can click on those, drag them around to wherever you like so they're not overlapping, and again, many of the rest of the tools are very similar to creating a regular drawing in Solidworks. You can create projected views, anything else that is needed specifically for your drawing or your elements that you are creating.

Down at the bottom you can populate the text fields however you would like as well. And with that, you've created a basic drawing of your pipe route that you can do easily in Solidworks.