From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2019 Essential Training

Working with subassemblies - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2019 Essential Training

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Working with subassemblies

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- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to be talking about building subassemblies inside of a top level assembly. Now, right now on the screen, I have a simple assembly of two components, and I want to to build an assembly of this assembly. So you can do that by going up here to File, and say Make Assembly from Assembly. Alright, I'm going to go ahead and choose that default template, click on OK, and go ahead and click on the green check mark to place that first subassembly into my now top level assembly. Alright, now if you want to bring in more of these subassemblies, you can easily do that by holding down control and just dragging another one in from the feature tree over here. And notice you get two now. Or you can come over here to the right, click on the File Explorer, you can go over here and take a look at the Desktop for instance, Exercise Files, you can come down to the chapter that we're in, which is Chapter 11. You can come down here to Chapter 11_4 and then here's all the components, right. So, if you want to bring any one of these components in, you can just click on it and you can see a little preview, and you can just drag that in. So, you can drag in components from the file system without actually even opening the components, which makes it really handy. Another cool thing about having a subassembly inside of a top level assembly, is anything that happens to this original assembly will automatically propagate through to all the different components that are in that assembly. So, if I go back over here to that other assembly, here it is right here, and if go back and I add in something to that assembly. So, down here, let's go ahead and choose one of these other components. We already have that component in there. So, let's go ahead and let's bring in this piece here. Alright, let's go ahead and mate that together. So, I'm going to say the outside of this, mated with the inside of that, and go ahead and slide that over here, and then mate this side to that side. Click on Okay. Alright, once I've done that, if I just head back over to my top level assembly, notice, both of these components now have that part added to them, because we've modified the subassembly, and those subassemblies happen to be in this top level assembly. So, any change in subassembly automatically propagate through to the top level assembly. And you can add as many components as you'd like into this top level. So, right here you can see we have two subassemblies, and we just have a random part, which is over here as well. So, you can have as many parts or subassemblies as you want. And the general rule of thumb, is when you're adding subassemblies to the top level is, build it the way you would build it in real life. So, if you have a whole bunch of components that would probably be assembled ahead of time in real life, and then installed into a top level assembly, that's exactly the same way you should build it in the computer. Sometimes, if you don't do it that way, you end up having to do a lot of extra work on your top level, because you end up doing assembly operations repetitively, because you're really combining the same components over and over again, when you really should be creating a subassembly, and then just bringing that subassembly into the top level here. Now, if you made a mistake, and you didn't create that subassembly ahead of time? Don't worry, you can actually go ahead and actually create subassemblies on the fly. So over here, if I say hey this component here, that component there, I'd love to make a subassembly of those components, you can actually select that component, right click on it and say Form New Subassembly right there. And do that. And you can see here we've added a brand new assembly, and then you can actually drag a component, and just drop it into that assembly, and now we've created this brand new subassembly right here, with those two components. If you click on the twirl down, you can then see that, that subassembly's inside of there, as well as that component, and then can save the subassembly out to the file system, if you'd like to by right clicking on it, and then selecting Save Subassembly or Save Assembly here, in External File and that will save it. Otherwise, it's just a virtual subassembly in this top level and totally fine. And by accident, if you did create a subassembly, you can also just right click on it, and just say Dissolve Subassembly. You can easily do that right here as well. And now you're back to where you were. So, you have a whole bunch of options for working with assemblies, and subassemblies, and bringing in parts. It's definitely recommended to try to create as many subassemblies as needed, so you're not doing a lot of repetitive work in you're top level assembly.

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