From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Tips & Tricks

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Reference length

Reference length

- [Voiceover] For this week's tip, I want to show you how to use a reference length. So I've got modeled on my screen right now a little piece of hose, or maybe it's a piece of tubing or anything that you need or has already been defined as a certain length. So maybe you have something that's defined as 30 inches long. Just a a piece of hose 30 inches long, but you'd like to bend it, and you'd like to use it, and you want to see what's going to happen inside a SolidWorks. So we can use what's called a reference length, and I can define that in my sketch. So I'm going to to head over here to my sketch, so there's my profile, here's my path, let's edit that sketch. Now I'm going to to click so I'm looking straight at that face. Now you can see I've got a 15 inch length here, I've got a radius of 6 inches, which is the bend radius for the hose, and now I have this other length up here. But I want to define this so that all these things fit into a total length of the thirty inches, or…

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