The standard parts library

- [Instructor] When we activated SOLIDWORKS routing earlier we saw new parts come up in our Design Library. Now we are going to take a closer look at the Library and see what's available to us. Some of the most important parts that you want to locate for piping are flanges, elbows, pipes, and crosses. We are going to be using these pieces during this course. There are more options in the Design Library than meet the eye. You might be familiar with some of these pieces from annotations, assemblies, features, parts, but we're going to actually scroll down to this new section, routing, that we peeked at a little bit earlier.

Now we're going to scroll down to the piping drop down, select this, and you'll see that we have the parts that I mentioned. Crosses, elbows, flanges, pipes, tees, et cetera. Definitely look through here and explore some of the different things that are available to you that you can use and don't have to create any models from scratch yourself. To insert a piece you're going to drag it in. We're going to select slip on weld flange, so that's this guy right here. Now you'll actually notice that there's one inserted over here already.

We're going to do something equivalent on this tank next door. So you're going to click this and drag it in, and you'll notice that it immediately wants to snap in location. This is because SOLIDWORKS uses something called smart mates. It's automatically adding in mates, such as concentric, to your model. This is very similar to the way it might automatically add in a parallel reference when you're doing sketching. So now once I let go you'll see this menu comes up, Select a Configuration.

These configurations are for different sizes of the same design of flange and allows us to pick the pipe or flange that best fits our design. But they're actually all based on one model. If you're familiar with design tables the data for configurations are based on design tables and allow us to have this drop down selection instead of scrolling through a huge library of very similar parts. Now you'll see that it automatically highlighted this one here. The program is actually assuming which size flange we need based on what it's being attached to.

Now I can still change this all manual if I wanted to, but since this is actually the size I want I'm going to go ahead and click OK. Now I could go ahead and actually insert additional components in this same way, but we only want one up here for now, so we're going to click this X here and exit out, and we now have this flange attached to the top of our tank. Once you get into more advanced use of routing software and you're looking to design your own custom parts and pipes design tables will be your tool to create your own library of parts just like these.

And we're going to discuss this a little bit later, so you have a better idea of how to start exploring that world. Now if you click the wrong configuration, don't worry, you can still actually go in and change it. Right-click on the part in this design tree over here and if you go up to this right here in the top right, Component Properties, you can go in and click which actual Referenced configuration you want. You'll see there's some other additional ones in here that weren't there before. And if you click OK you'll notice that it changed on the top of here and changed the size and some of the other dimensions and I would now be able to use this new configuration on our design.

But I don't actually want that for our design, so I'm going to right-click here, Component Properties, and I can go back to what I had before. And then click OK and you'll see that I'm back to where I was before with the right size for the attachment that I want. We have now inserted our first part from the Design Library and saw how configurations relate to piping and routing. We can now move on and further analyze how SOLIDWORKS manages these components in the design tree.