Import models

00:01

In this series of videos, we're going to take existing parts and put them together to assemble a portion of this engine. Most of the work we've done up until now has been designing parts in place in an assembly. And that's considered top-down design. In this series of videos, we're going to work the other way. We're going to use existing parts and put them together in what's known as bottom-up design.

00:29

So let's get started with a new project. The way to bring in existing parts is to go to the File menu and use Import into Current Project.

00:42

The parts that we have prepared are all parasolid parts, but you can use anything that's on this list of imported file types. We're going to start out by bringing in the block casting part.

00:58

We can take a look and make sure that the imported part is exactly what we expect. And it is. So let's bring in the next part. We'll go again to File, Import to Current Project, and this time we'll select the crank part. Again, let's check and make sure we've got the correct part.

01:22

and this part is correct. So now we want to assemble this into place. To do that, we'll use the align command, but we're also going to use the SBI, the selection based interface. So I'm going to select this face and see what options Shapr3D gives me. One of the options is the align command, and so that's exactly what I was looking for. I'll select on that.

01:49

then I'll pick from one of these purple dots and drag that onto the face I want to mate it to in the other part. Now we're presented with several options here. We can flip the part on that mate to flip it back and forth. We can move it up and down along that mate or we can rotate it in place.

02:15

We'll take a look at some more advanced methods for using the align tool a little later on. Let's click done to move on. And what we want to do in this design is check to make sure that the cylinder is long enough for the piston stroke. We've assembled the crank in the position of the maximum height of the piston within the cylinder. So next we will need to add the piston rod. So we'll go to file.

02:45

import to current project, piston rod, open, flip it over again, and we've got the correct part. Sometimes when you're putting parts together, one part gets in the way of visualization. We can return to some of our old tricks of turning other parts off. This makes it much more convenient, and

03:12

we can look at this part and try to assemble it from here. I'm going to grab this face, again, click on the align tool and then drag another dot and I'll drop it on this purple dot to get the alignment that I want. This comes close, but you can see there's still a little interference there. And so I can move this back the appropriate amount. I should get a message that says,

03:41

coplanar arcs, but this is talking about the chamfer and so I need to move this the amount of the chamfer to get everything lined up. Part of this design check may also reveal that we need to make edits to some of the existing parts because they aren't designed properly to fit together. So let's do that. We'll say done. We can take a measurement from this face to

04:11

this face and we can see we've got a distance of a little over eight thousandths of an inch. So we can actually take this part by double clicking on it and move it 0.0081. And now it's perfectly lined up on this face but we see now we've got a different problem. We're going to have to remove some material. Let's take another measurement from here and shift.

04:39

click 0.0393 inches. And if we divide that in two, we'll have 0.01965. And so we can move these faces, this one, move it down by 0.01965 and move this up.

05:05

by 0.01965. Okay, now we'll have to move this part as well. Again, double click to move the entire body, drag it down, 0.01965. And now we should be centered.