Using clips

- [Instructor] Clips are very important in tubing and allow us to give more guidance to our flexible tube route in real life and in SolidWorks. We will take a look at how they can be used in SolidWorks using one of our design library clips. Let's start by going up and locating that under routing, and then just click the tubing top folder, instead of going into one of the smaller ones, and you'll see here, there is a tubing clip. So now, let's go in and work on guiding this new tube route that we've created and now edited, and I'm going to right click on it, edit route.

Now I'm going to go in and actually add a tubing clip into this route. So I'm just dragging it over and you'll see it kind of snaps to the edge of this wall. Let's go ahead and add it in right here, so that we can try to bring our tube route out a little bit further and make sure it doesn't interfere with that fitting. So now that we've drag and dropped it, it is making a coincident mate, and I'm okay with that 'cause it's coincident to the wall, so I'm going to go ahead and click the check mark to add or finish mate. If you wanted to change it, you could add in different mates, such as, parallel, perpendicular, distance, easy shortcuts just right off the bat when you add this clip in.

So, go ahead and click the check mark. And I'm only going to do one clip here, just so we can see how it works, but you could definitely go in and add many other clips to help guide your tube exactly where you want it in your design. The more exact you make it, the better estimates you'll get of actually how much tubing you would need and how much length you would need to purchase. I'm going to go ahead and x out, 'cause that's all the clips I need. And now, we're going to go ahead and look at some of the tools to both edit this clip and then how to actually run this route through it. So if I go up to the top, you'll see these three tools that are related to clips.

Rotating clip, rotate an existing clip, route or edit through clip. So, make your route go through the clip, or edit a route that's already going through one and unhook if you no longer want to use that clip. So I'm going to go ahead and select rotate clip, just so we can explore these different options. Now, select components to rotate. I'm going to go over and click on the clip that we just added in and now you could select to align axis. If you want to do align to axis of this clip to a certain element in the design.

However, we're just going to go ahead and rotate by a certain number of degrees. So let's say we wanted to rotate it by 20 degrees. Then after we do that, you will see, once it updates, it will rotate 20 degrees in that direction. If you wanted to go the other way, you could put negative 20 and it would automatically rotate in the other direction. However, let's just leep it straight up and down for now, but just keep this in mind, in case you needed to rotate clips in a certain way. So I'm going to select undo on those options and just check mark to keep it in that vertical position.

Now next we're going to route our tube through this clip. So, I'm going to select Route/Edit Through Clip and now I'm going to select the portion of the route that I would like to go through it. So I'm going to select this spline and now I'm going to select the axis of rotation of this clip and you can see that that automatically popped up as a selection to make it easier for you. So once I click it, you see it automatically snaps over to it and it goes perfectly through that clip. Now, you'll see that also there is a slight overlap just because of the covering that we added, so make sure to keep this is mind when you're picking certain varieties of your tube or clip.

Now, just a couple of options to keep in mind. If you wanted to change your direction, say that this tube routed in in the wrong way, you would just click on flip direction. You can see, we don't want to do that, but that's an option that you do have. So I'm going to click it again to flip it back. And then you can also go into sketch/drag mode. So that, still maintaining this route through the clip, you can drag it up and down to edit as you would need to to make it fit exactly what you want your route to be. So I'm just going to leave it right there and now I'm going to go ahead and click the check mark.

And you can see we now have a route that's going through this clip here. This is great for routing our tubes in the exact places that we want to in our design. And then the last think we could do is unhook from clip. So, exactly what we just did, we're going to go ahead and undo it. Now, something to keep in mind is this check mark which is re-route to the shortest path. If you don't select this, your route is not guaranteed to go back to the shortest path that might be created during an autoroute. You would have to go and manually move your spline to edit your tube. So we're going to go ahead and click re-route to shortest path, and now make sure when you're selecting your current selection, you select the piece that actually is running through the clip.

If you click on a potion of your spline that's not going through it, you'll get this error. Just letting you know that you didn't click a point that goes through a clip. So I'm going to select OK and now I'm going to go ahead and click the portion that does go through it and you'll see, it automatically snaps back to the autoroute shape that we created initially, when we were working on creating our first initial autoroute. Alright, so I'm going to go ahead and click OK. By putting these clips on your design, you now see that you can get more control over your flexible tubes in SolidWorks and when your designs are actually produced as well.