Solidworks Drawing Tutorial

In this tutorial you will learn how to make machine shop-ready drawings for parts modeled in SolidWorks. The first part of this tutorial covers drawing and dimensioning individual parts; the second part shows how to draw an assembly. This tutorial assumes that you have a basic working knowledge of SolidWorks; that is, that you can make simple parts without difficulty.

The most important purpose of creating a mechanical drawing is to enable another person, most likely a machinist or mold-maker, to realize your ideas in the manner you intend. It follows that all information necessary to define a part must be somewhere on the drawing. If you fail to include information on a drawing the machininst will be forced to use his/her imagination in making a part, often with unhappy results.

To begin the tutorial, we will model a very simple engine block in SolidWorks. First create a new part, then draw the sketch shown above left. Note that a Symmetric relationship has been used to center the rectangle on the origin. Extrude the sketch to a height of 2 inches.

Now pick a large side face and make the cutout sketch as shown above center. Use Extruded Cut and pick Through All. Pick a small face and extrude a small hole Through All as shown top right.

Finally, let us add the tapped holes in the bottom of the block for attaching it to a base. Pick one of the bottom faces of the block and choose the Hole Wizard tool. The first step in the wizard asks you for a hole type and size. In this case we want a tapped hole for a 8-32 screw. SolidWorks has a database of hole sizes for tapped and untapped holes, so you don’t need to go to the chart in

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Standard Ansi InchScrew Type Tapped holeSize #8-32Tap drill type & depth

Blind 0.5 in

Add cosmetic

the machine shop! In the top tab pick Tap and fill out the table as shown at left. Once you have filled out the table choose Next.

At this stage you can add as many 8-32 tapped holes as you want. The sketcher is set to draw points; for every point you add an additional hole will be drawn. Add three more points for a total of four. Then dimension the points so that they are located as shown in the sketch at left. Note that, as before, a symmetric relationship was used to locate the center the hole pattern on the origin. After you click Finish you will see that four holes are created. If you expand the #8-32 Tapped Hole1 icon you will see that two sketches have been created: one for the hole profile (diameter and depth) and one defining the location of the holes. You can edit the hole location sketch later if you need to move the holes. Save the part as Engine Block or some other descriptive name (i.e. do not save it as “part1”; a week from now you won’t have any idea what part1 is!)

Creating the DrawingWe are now ready to create a drawing of the engine block. In creating a drawing you have the choice of starting with a blank sheet of paper, using the SolidWorks drawing template or using your own template. Using the blank sheet of paper requires you to recreate all of the “boilerplate” drawing info (scale, part name, tolerances, etc.) from scratch each time, which is tedious. The SolidWorks drawing template is probably the “correct” one to use in practice, but it has way more information on it than we normally need here at Rowan. I have created a simplified drawing template as a starting point for you; you can modify it to suit your needs. To use it open the drawing file “Constans Drawing Template.SLDDRW”. Use Save As to create your own drawing file.

Zoom in on the information block at the lower right. There are several important pieces of information in this box, including the name of the part, its material, the drawing number and scale, the quantity of parts to make, your name and the date. Note the box showing tolerance information. In this tolerancing system the number of decimal places in a dimension controls how tight the tolerance is. The system shown here is fairly standard, with three decimal places indicating a tolerance of ± one thousandth of an inch. Some systems have three decimal places indicating ±0.005; it is up to you to decide. Only specify tight tolerances where they are needed! Each additional decimal place adds a factor of 10 to the cost of producing a part.

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To change any part of the information box first right-click anywhere on the sheet and select Edit Sheet Format. To change any of the text, double-click on it. To change the font, uncheck the Use Document’s Font dialog box and click the Font button. Now change the text in the information block to suit your drawing. Once you are finished, zoom out to view the entire sheet, right-click and select Edit Sheet.

To put your part into the drawing, select the View Layout tab and pick Model View. Select the Engine Block model and click on the blue arrow at the top of the dialog box to go to the next screen. In the dialog box that comes up, pick the Back View, since many of the important parts of the engine block (i.e. the tapped holes at the bottom) are seen from the back. Click on the screen to place the view. By default, none of the views have hidden lines displayed. To display hidden lines in a view, click on the border of the view and select the Hidden in Gray icon. You must do this for each view; there is no method that I know of for changing the whole sheet at once.

Now, click the Projected View button on the Model View tab, and click the back view you just created. When you move the mouse below the back view, you’ll see a side view appear, and when you move the mouse beside the back view, a view from the other side appears. Click below and to the side of the back view to place the other two views. Finally, click diagonally from the back view to create an isometric illustration.To move a view select its border and drag it to the desired location. Note that the three views always maintain alignment with each other; in other words, you can’t move the lower view left to right and you can’t move the rightmost view up and down. To move all three views at once, click on the border of the upper left view and drag it.

To correctly dimension a drawing we need to first decide upon two things: a reference point and how many dimensions we need to fully define the part. You must choose one reference point for a part and define all dimensions from this point. This practice will make your parts more accurate and easier (cheaper) to produce. There are exceptions to this rule, but they are for parts more complicated than you are likely to make at Rowan.

Choosing a good reference point can also make the difference between easy and difficult production. Wherever you can you should take advantage of symmetry since it is easy to set up a milling machine to find the centerline of a part. For the engine block a logical reference point is the centerline of the bore at the bottom face. Every feature of the engine block is symmetric

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about this point so we need a reduced number of dimensions to define the part.

We’ll start by dimensioning the upper left view. In this view there are five holes. To dimension a hole we need to draw center marks. Choose the Annotation tab, and select the Center Mark tool. Click on any of the holes to add a center mark. Then dimension the drawing until it looks like the figure at right. To define the tapped hole use the Hole Callout button on the Annotations toolbar.

Note that in using the center of the block as a reference point we only needed five dimensions to define this view. Now dimension the other views until they look like the figure below.

Creating an Exploded Assembly ViewTo show how an assembly fits together it is often helpful to create an exploded view. Open the assembly file Engine Assembly.SLDASM and choose Exploded View from the Assembly tab. You can choose to have SolidWorks “AutoExplode” the assembly for you, but if you want more control you should explode each part individually. Follow these steps to explode a part.

1. Select the component you wish to explode. 2. Click and drag the colored arrow that points in the direction you wish to move. 3. To explode another component, simply click it, and drag its arrow as far as you want.

If you want to change the amount a component has moved, you can simply click on the explode step, and drag the blue arrow that appears. If you want more than one component to move when you drag it, hold down the CTRL key while selecting the components.

Now open up a new drawing sheet and use the Model View tool on the View Layout tab to insert a view of the engine assembly. In the second dialog box that appears, put a checkmark in Current Model View, so that the exploded view will appear on the screen. You may need to change the scale that the exploded view appears; to do so, select the Use Custom Scale radio button and select your new scale.

You can attach part numbers to the drawing by selecting the Balloon button from the Annotations tab. Choose Tight Fit for the size and Custom for the Balloon Text, then enter in part numbers as needed. To make a simple bill of materials, you can create the annotation using the

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Note tool in the Annotations tab. To complete this drawing, create the part names shown in the figure below.

Here’s a fun hint: you can make a table in Excel and copy and paste it into a SolidWorks drawing. This way you can neatly format a Bill of Materials for your assembly view and then paste it into SolidWorks. SolidWorks also has a Bill of Materials feature, but I haven’t had much luck with it.

Finally, to “unexplode” the assembly, click on the ConfigurationManager tab at the top of the FeatureManager, expand the Default icon and right-click ExplView1. Select Collapse. Note that your exploded view is still saved, you can re-explode it by right-clicking and selecting Explode.

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