Secondary flange with bolts and nuts

00:00

For this video, we're gonna be working with the flange you see here on the screen. We're gonna create another mating flange to that and then grab some bolts and nuts from the internet, download those and then insert them into this model. And then we can use those to pattern them around to bolt these two flanges together. Now, of course you could design your own bolts and nuts, but why do all that extra work when they're freely available from the internet? All right, to get started, let's create the secondary flange. So right over here, you can see I've got this part.

00:27

and you could of course create a whole nother flange from the beginning, but why do that when you have the mirror command available to us? So let's go ahead, spin this around, and that's the bottom of the part there, and I wanna create a little gap, right? Because I don't want these to be flanged to flange. You could of course, if you just came down here and said, hey, I just want to use that flange here, I wanna create a transform or a mirror, here's my mirror. I can say, hey, I'd like to select this entire body, which would be right here.

00:54

I could then say I'd like to use like this flange right here and then mirror it across. The problem if you do all that though is these are touching, right? There's no gap, right? If we zoom in here, you can see there's no gap between the two and generally you wanna have a gasket between these flanges. So we need to create some construction geometry and create a plane, right? So right over here, you can see here, I've got this thing called add and I say construction plane. I can choose that one right there. I can choose that and click on next.

01:23

and then I wanna do the offsets. So I wanna drag that plane down a little bit, and most of those flanges, or sorry, not flange, but the gaskets are about 50,000. So I actually wanna do about half that. So 0.025 is half of 50,000s, and click OK, and now I've got that plane there. So I'm gonna use that plane to mirror this thing over. So right over here, here's the body, and come down here to More, click on Mirror, and I'm gonna choose that plane to create that mirror. Now...

01:51

If we zoom in here, we can see we've got a little gap that we could then of course put, there's the gap, that we can put a gasket in if you need to or want to. But in this case, I wanna focus on the bolts and the nuts. Okay, now of course we could design our own bolts and nuts, but you know, it's a lot easier to download those things off the internet. So let me show you a source that I use, depending on where you happen to be in the world. In this case here, I'm using McMaster Car. In the US, McMaster Car is a

02:21

Hardware store that has just about everything you can ever imagine. And they also allow you to download those things in step files or a whole bunch of other different types of files right here. But step happens to work probably the best for importing to Shapr. So go ahead and choose this, hit download. Same thing with the nut, go over here, choose step, hit download, but I've already done that. So let's just go ahead and use the files I already downloaded. So back over here, I wanna come over here to file. I wanna say import to current project.

02:50

Okay, so first one, I wanna go ahead and grab that bolt, click on open, and that should import that bolt right into the center of this model, here it is. And if you click on this little twirl down here, there is the shape. I'm gonna grab this one here, I'm gonna rotate that around so that says 90, or just type in 90 on your screen. And then of course, I want to drag that out over to here. It happens to be 5.875, happens to be right in the center of that hole, and that looks pretty good.

03:18

I'm gonna spin this thing around a little bit so I can look closer at it, and I wanna bring that down. So it's just pretty much right at the surface of the model there. That looks great to me. There's my bolt. Very easy, way less work than actually creating the bolt yourself. And now we have it right in the model. Let's do it one more time here. I'm gonna go File, Import Current Project. This one, as you can imagine, we're gonna go ahead and grab the nut. Click OK. Or click Open. It's gonna import that file. And here it is again.

03:46

And if I choose that tool now and click on that one there, I can move it down just a little bit and then drag it out. So it's at that, let's see where we're at, 5.875 and then spin that around. And let's go ahead and zoom in here a little bit so we can see what's going on. And we're gonna move that up into position right about there, okay? So now we've got the bolt, we have the nut. Now we could of course keep importing these things in, but that would be obviously not a lot of extra work.

04:15

Why do that when we can just pattern this thing around? So we've got a couple handy tools available to us over here. And here's our transform and we have pattern, right? So here's our pattern. But before we do that, I wanna turn on a couple other sketches here. So we make sure, let's turn that off. So right over here is a sketch of where this whole thing was these holes originally created from. We're gonna use that to find that center point. Then come over here to transform and we're gonna use the pattern.

04:44

Of course we're gonna be doing a circular pattern and what do we wanna pattern around? Well, I'd like to pattern the bolt itself, which you think is right here, and the nut, which is down there. So I can select both of those.

04:57

Let's see what happens, so there's both of those. All right, and then we wanna pattern those, so I'm gonna spin this thing, so it's over here, and grab that middle, that point, and I'm gonna snap that right to the center of that pattern, all right? So we have that there. And then I'm gonna grab this little arrow here, and I'm gonna start dragging this thing around, and notice you can see those little bolts spinning around there, and the angle is 360, right? And the total is gonna be eight, all right? And...

05:27

There you go. So we've got eight and click OK. Spin that around and I can see we've got.

05:35

We've got those different, the bolts and the nuts. Here's the spacing. Everything's looking pretty solid here. Of course you can turn some of these sketches off or on as needed. And then when you got it done, you're pretty much looking solid like this. You've got the two flanges. You've got the plane that we put between the two. And now you've got the bolts. If you need to make any modifications, of course you can go over here to the history bar and you can see how we've created this part from the very beginning. Starting over here, we mirrored that over. We imported that bolt.

06:03

we moved it over in a position, imported the nut, moved to position, and then of course we patterned them around. And if you ever needed to change how many parts you're patterning or if you added something else in, of course you could add more over here. You can choose the center point, you can move things, you can change the angle and so on. You can do all those adjustments right over here in the history bar. And of course, by using the patterning tools and the mirroring tools, we've saved ourself a whole bunch of time. And of course, the availability of parts that are on the internet.

06:30

is just getting more and more every day. So definitely if you have a standard part, like a nut, a bolt, a cylinder, anything you're gonna purchase, generally those files are available to you. You can download them as a step file, an IDES file or any other format and then import them to Shapr. It's gonna save you a whole bunch of time in the long run. Thanks for watching.