Weld gap

- [Instructor] When designing pipes for various systems, there's a chance you'll need to include weld gaps in your design. Weld gaps take into account the space needed for welders to properly attach your pipe segments so that the final design fits into the allocated space. Although you can account for these in the route at the beginning in the start route menu, you can also add them after the fact in various segments. So let's work on adding that into this segment here. I'm going to go ahead and open this assembly to edit the route. And now I'm going to click on this segment cuz I want to add some weld gaps in this area of this pipe segment.

So I'm going to right-click, and this time, I'm going to go into Weld Gap. Now you'll see fairly simple menu come up here. Now since we want to great weld gaps, we're going to go ahead and click that button. And you'll see you have options to add it at all of the points that SOLIDWORKS knows you could add in weld gaps. So if you needed to add a weld gap in somewhere else, you would have to create a split or an additional pipe to be able to do that. Cuz right now, you can only add it between the main connecting points. So you can either go and manually type in your distances here, or if you know that you want them all to be the same size, you can also do that over on the left.

So let's make this 0.5, 0.5, 0.2, and there we go and then we can also leave this one as is. So you don't have to add weld gaps to all of them, just do it to the ones that are necessary. However, if you also want to make a default weld gap, you can add that in over here. So we're going to override the default gap which was originally 0.00 since we didn't add one in when we originally made this route. So let's make this default gap 0.5 just so it's easily visible to us.

So this way, it'll override all the numbers that I already typed in here and make them all the same. However, obviously if you want them all to be different, feel free to keep that as it was. After you're done with that, you can go ahead and click the check mark. And then after you exit out of the sketch, you can actually see your gaps have now appeared between your pipes. So that way you can know that the gaps have been added and you know that it's taken into account for this length of pipe. Now let me exit out of the assembly as well.

So if you wanted to be able to add that into the other segments, you'd have to go in and do that manually for each one. However if it was one long route like this, it would be able to add it in to all of those at once. So now that you've altered your pipeline slightly to more accurately represent your final pipe needs and routing design, you're ready to move on to the next step.