Join Gabriel Corbett for an in-depth discussion in this video Creating the planes, part of Steel Building Design with SOLIDWORKS Weldments.
- In this course we're gonna be designing a steel building using the weldments package inside of SOLIDWORKS. This is a preview of the building we're gonna be laying out. And to get started, what I want to do is I want to open up a brand new document and start a plane and sketch on the top plane. So to do that, go ahead and open up a brand new document, or, you can open up File 1.1, which is exactly a blank document with just the top plane showing. Go ahead and choose that top plane and start a sketch on it. I want to define a rectangle right from the origin, and that's gonna be a center point rectangle.
Then I want to define the size of the building. So I'm gonna type here, and give it a dimension. I'm gonna type in 36 feet, and for feet, I'm gonna use the single quote, and for inches I'm gonna use the double quote. Do the same thing at the top. This time I must type in 24 feet. And then exit out of the sketch. Next, what I would like to do is define the size of a slab of concrete that the building's going to be sitting on. So I'm gonna go ahead and choose the top plane one more time, choose Sketch, and start that center point rectangle one more time, right from the origin.
Define out the size, and then come up here to dimension. I'm gonna dimension from the edge of my first rectangle, to the edge of my second rectangle, and I'm gonna type in six feet. Okay, do the same thing for the edge, six feet, all right. And then notice they're not aligned. We can easily solve this problem by clicking on the origin, and then clicking on either one of these lines and choosing mid point. You notice that puts everything on center, and then exit out. All right.
Now what we need to do is define where the ceiling of the building's gonna be. So what I want to do is choose the top plane, choose Features, go over to Reference Geometry and choose Plane. And notice as soon as I do that, it already has the preselected top plane, but it wasn't there. Go ahead and exit out. Choose the top plane again, pops right back in. And then for my dimension I want to type in 12 feet. It's already in there, so just type in 12 feet, click on Okay. And there's where my roof section's gonna be to start my building design. Now on my right plane, or front plane, in this case it's gonna be the front plane, I can also define the shape of the roof, or just give myself a little bit of a starting point for when I do start designing that roof section.
Go ahead and choose Sketch, start a new sketch, and this time I'm gonna start with a center line from the center of the building, and just pop that up right over there. And add a couple of dimensions or some lines out here to the side to define kind of the slope of the roof. We know those are gonna be the same so go ahead and choose both of them by holding down control. Let go of control and choose Equal. All right. And we want to make sure that these are on the edge of the building. So to do that, let's go ahead and draw a vertical line here.
And it doesn't necessarily have to touch anything. It's kind of out in space here, here it is. Now I want to make sure that this end point here is on this line right here. So holding down control, I select them both, and then if I let go, I can say Pierce, and that just brings that over. Do the same thing for the other side of the building. Just draw a line, making sure it is vertical. And if it's not vertical, you can always go ahead and choose Vertical from right there. You can also go ahead and make sure you're showing sketch relations by choosing View and then showing the sketch relations.
And once you have those on there, let's go ahead and add this point here to this line here, holding down control, and click on Pierce. Great. Do the same thing here at the top, end of the line to the line here. And Coincident and do the same thing over here. Coincident. Now we want to make sure that this line here and that line over there happen to be the same length, so let's go ahead and say Equal. Okay. We want to define these at 12 feet so type in 12 feet.
And there it is. And I can define, if I click on Normal To, from the top of the roof to the corner here, and I'll say six feet. Last thing from one of the vertical lines to the end of the roof section, define a six foot overhang. Click Okay, and there it is. That's not the final roof, that's just a good layout for what we're doing next. Go ahead and exit out. And now we're ready to define a few more of the 2D sketches that are going to define the shape of this building so we can start laying out our weldments.
- Creating the planes
- Drawing 2D structures
- 3D sketching
- Choosing structural members
- Creating the roof frame
- Welding the structure
- Assembling the weldment
- Creating assembly and part detail drawings
- Designing custom weldment profiles