Dock cleat, part 1: Designing a dock cleat

00:00

Hey everyone, check out this project. Right here on the screen is a dock cleat. So that's what you're gonna be tying up a ship or a boat to. You might see them a lot on, by the harbor. And in this case here, we're gonna be designing this part out. Now the skills are gonna be learning to actually create this part you see here on the screen are gonna be, they're gonna be applicable to a whole bunch of things, right? So this is not just a deck cleat. This is a learning experience of.

00:26

How do we create a complex shape like this? It's got a little bit of taper to it, right? It's got a little bit of an interesting shape here. It has a little bend to it. They're subtle, but they're there. How do we create that? There's some draft in this part. So these skills like draft and adding complex shapes and tapers like that, those skills can be used for any type of a molded part, right? So this is a, maybe a sand cast part, which is cast iron. But how about injection molding, die casting, things like that, anything you're gonna be using in a molded part.

00:56

these skills are gonna apply. How about some of these advanced drawing skills and some of this construction geometry? That can be used for anything you're creating. So definitely, even if you're not creating a doc lead, the skills you're gonna be learning here can be used for a variety of different designs. So let me go in and dissect the model that I've already created here for you on the screen and we can see exactly how we created this. Now I've already rendered it and I put a nice galvanized texture to the outside so it's looking pretty nice right now. So let's go ahead and just turn all that back off.

01:25

Go back to virtualization or visualization and go over to modeling. And here is my cleat. And let's go ahead and spin it around. Let's open up the items. Right over here you can see I've got sketch number one and that is defining that basic shape. Now you can see there's quite a bit going on in there, right? So I've got these kind of helper lines. So I kind of snapped to the origin down here. I come up with a line. I've got another line defining kind of the thickness of this in the center, which is that two inches here. And then right down here at the end, I want a nice rounded corner. So I made a little bit of a radius here.

01:56

to define that shape. Now how much bend do we have? How much banana do we gonna add to our design is controlled by this number right here, this 1.5. So if I move that number up or down, it's gonna add a little bit more bend to the cleat. Same thing over here is the length of the cleat. So I'm defining the length. Notice this little vertical line here. I have that as a tangent relationship over here to the end. So I'm making sure that nothing gets longer than that 15 inches for this design.

02:22

Of course, we're designing this so we can modify the design later on. If we wanna make a larger one or a smaller one, we can easily get in here and modify these dimensions to change the design. Okay, so that's our first thing we're gonna do. And then that's going to be extruded out into a shape. And the next thing is gonna be this sketch number two, right over here, so sketch two. That's gonna take and trim the ends off this thing to add a little radius here to the ends, right? And then also trim this material off.

02:50

to add a little bit of taper to that shape. So it's tapering as it gets towards the ends. Now, right over here, I'm gonna create these two posts here, which is gonna be the strength of the cleat itself. And then we're gonna create the little base. Now this design is set up for something like a welded cleat. So if you had like a steel ship, something like that, you'd weld this onto the actual ship. Of course, you could make a bolted cleat, then you maybe add a couple holes through the center of these things and add a place for the bolts.

03:20

That's your option. In fact, that might even be extra credit. So if you've designed, or if you're gonna follow along with the design, try to create this and then add those bolt holes as well. And finally, we're gonna go ahead and create that body and here it is. And if I go over here to the history, you can see exactly how we did this. So there's that original sketch. We extruded out, we add a little bit of draft to it. Sketch down here, we're gonna take that and then we're gonna cut that away to create that profile. We're gonna fillet the edges of this thing. Then we're gonna come down here to a sketch to find that. And we're gonna extrude those up into that body.

03:49

Again, come down with another sketch here of this ellipse, and then we're gonna extrude that one up, right? Now we're gonna chamfer that edge there, and then we're gonna boolean add. We're gonna add all those individual shapes together, and then finally we're gonna come in and do a nice fillet and smooth everything off. So that's how we're gonna create this part. So let's go ahead and dive into a brand new part and start from the beginning. So I'm gonna come up here to File and say New Project. All right, here it is. So let's go ahead and start a sketch. Here's our sketch tool, and I'm gonna choose one of these surfaces here.

04:19

This one makes a lot of sense here, so I'm gonna click on that. Now, like I talked about, I wanna tie everything back to the origin. So I'm gonna start with the line command. Hit L on the keyboard and snap right there, and I'm gonna come up here, and I'm gonna type that first value in of 2.5, right? There's my value, okay? And notice I wanna snap it vertical. Same thing next one, I wanna snap again. This time, notice it stays active, right? So if you wanna have it active, that's fine. I'm gonna make the line go in this direction here, and then hit escape and turn it off.

04:49

Let's zoom in a little bit closer here so we can see what's going on. This line here, we wanna make sure it's vertical, it already is. This point here, I want to lock that down so it's attached to the origin. This guy over here, it's already vertical, but the value here actually want that to be 2.0, so I'm gonna change that value, okay? And then over here, this line here, I wanna make that a construction line. So I'm gonna go over here and say, make construction. That's gonna define that first tangency.

05:16

to the actual shape of the product. So I'm gonna use that just to kinda help us out. Go back into the line command, I'm gonna make one more line just like that one right there. The length of the line doesn't matter, right? Because we're using this line purely as construction geometry. I'm just saying, hey, I want that line to be there. I do wanna make sure that it is horizontal, right? So there's my horizontal line, so you can see here these two lines. They're just gonna be our helpers, and then you've got the 2.5 and this other one here. All right, now jumping back in it, let's create one more line. This time,

05:45

I'm gonna create a line that snaps from the center point and it goes out here. And I wanna make a circle, put a C for a circle, and there's my circle, okay? So again, let's kinda zoom in what we're doing here. The dimension of that circle I wanna make, right? I wanna make that, I want the radius of this to be 1.9, right, so right over here it's four, so I'm gonna say actually 0.9, but we're working in the diameter right now, so I'm gonna say 0.9 plus 0.9.

06:16

That's 1.8, right? And then click OK. All right, so that's defining that shape. Right, so depending if you're working in diameters or radiuses, you may need to do the math. Obviously, probably didn't need to calculate for that one, but just in case, we're ready. Over here, this line here, that's also construction geometry. So we're good there. I'm gonna move, slide that over here a bit and zoom in. Okay, so we've got the starting point here. We got the other point. We've got the circle, so we can define things.

06:45

How about the length? I'm gonna create another line out here, okay? And I'm gonna put this line right over here, just kinda in space. I do wanna make sure it's vertical, but I want that line to be a construction line, right? And now what I wanna do is I wanna zoom in on it.

07:01

Okay, click on this line here, hold down shift, grab that line right there. I'm gonna say, hey, these guys are tangent. And as soon as I've created that tangents relationship, now I kind of have the maximum extent, no matter where this circle happens to be, what that length is, right? So I can say from this line here, hold down shift, grab that line over there, I can say that dimension here, that's actually gonna be 7.5, right? So I'm constraining the maximum it can be, especially it's hard to do when they have like a round.

07:28

surface out here, so using that tangent line kinda can help out with that. All right, now, we really haven't created much geometry. We've just done a whole bunch of kind of construction geometry here. Now we wanna create our actual lines. So right over here is the arc command, or A on the keyboard. Click on this point right here. I wanna bring that line out and snap it to that circle. Same thing over here. I'm gonna grab that point there and snap it to the circle, and there's my lines. All right, now, I wanna make sure this line over here, hold down Shift, grab that other line over there,

07:57

And I wanna say, hey, you guys, these guys are tangent, right, so notice they come up tangent now, that's making sure that that point in the center is always gonna be tangent. Same thing over here, this line here, hold down Shift, that line right there, tangent. All right, how about out here? Right now here, you can see we've got an issue, right? It's, this is not tangent to that, so click on that again. Hold down Shift, tangent, right, same thing down here. This guy, that guy, tangent. All right, now things are starting to look nice, right?

08:27

The only problem is we've got this line in here. So we wanna trim that away. So hit the T command for trim. I'm gonna trim that away, trim that away there. And now we're looking pretty solid, right? So now we've got a shape. It starts here. We've got this line here. That I think we might not have turned into construction geometry. There's our construction geometry. Okay, so now we've got it coming up. It's going across. And that's basically the shape we want to extrude, right? But here's the thing. I wanna add draft.

08:56

to this shape, so I want it to taper to both directions. And if I make only half the part, which I normally would only do, because I'd like to mirror that over, I don't want to create all that geometry two times. That's a lot of time, a lot of extra effort, right? We don't want to do that. But if I don't do that right now, if I don't mirror it right now, when I do the tapering, it's actually going to taper in here and it's going to make it so I can't mirror it across. So we're going to be forced to mirror this over. So if you hit the...

09:25

Come down here, let's go ahead and just get out of this for a second. You can go down to transform, right, and you got mirror, right? And what I wanna mirror, I wanna mirror this whole thing, and I wanna mirror over that line, right? Click okay, and now I've got this little bit, a shape that's symmetrical, right? And now when I click on this surface here, or that one there, I can choose both of those, and I can drag those out, right? But instead of going one direction, right? Notice under here, extrude, I can say symmetric, right? I can say, hey, how do we want to make this thing symmetric?

09:56

And in this case here, it looks like we didn't do that right. So we started here, we didn't do it right. So let's go back, back again, over here, back over here to the extrude, right? So the different, you know, again, you got your different tools over here. Here's the extrude, right? And I'm gonna switch over here to symmetric. This time I'm gonna choose those two surfaces and making sure that when we're pulling them out, we're pulling in both directions, okay? Now, we also might wanna create some draft.

10:23

So here's our draft, I can drag this in and out, and I'm gonna change it to five degrees. So now notice if you look at the part, we're drafting both directions from that center line. And then click okay. Now, if you look at it, the dimension I actually dragged it out to, I think it was a little bit greater than it wants to be. The dimension I'm looking for is 1.2. And if I go over here to the history, you can see here's that extrusion. If I twirl it down, notice I have all that information here. So here's my profile.

10:53

Symmetric is the distance and the distance is actually 1.25 here, I should wanna make that 1.2, right? And angle and that's all fine. So once everything's there, you're good. You can easily go back and modify these things right over here at the history bar, right? So pretty handy. All right, once we've got that initial shape, now what we wanna do is we wanna taper this thing to the edges, right? So if you look at the top.

11:17

Eh, it doesn't look that great. It's really a lot better or cooler if it was kind of tapering away and kind of rounded the ends of this thing. And that's exactly what we wanna do. So to do that, I'm gonna start another sketch. Here's my sketch, and I'm gonna start right here at the ground, the bottom plane. So I'm looking through the part itself. And I'm gonna do a little bit of things here to kind of snap to the different positions, right? So if I zoom in here a little bit, I'm gonna create a line, right? And I'm gonna create a line right from the origin.

11:47

Right, here's my line, and that's gonna define a circle. Right, so if I hit C for circle, I can come over here and define whatever that circle is. That circle's what we're gonna use to kind of trim the end of this part. Okay, and I also like to create those lines, and let's zoom in and zoom out over here. I'm gonna create that vertical line again, and this time I'm gonna create that line, make a construction geometry, and then I'm gonna snap it over here to this and make those tangent, right?

12:15

and then that's what I'm gonna use to define the shape. Now more than likely, you're gonna say, hey, from this point here over to that line, it's gonna be that same value of the 7.5, right? But you may need to change that. If you wanna vary the design a little bit, you may change that. And then same thing over here. We're gonna figure out, well, what dimension do we want here? So in this case, it's three. We really don't want three. What we're looking for is a little bit different angle there. So I'm gonna make it like 0.95 is my radius, right? So,

12:45

Let's go ahead and type that in, so 0.95, but remember it's also a diameter, so it's giving you that 1.9, and then that's what our shape's gonna be. Now what I wanna do is I wanna create a similar thing we did before, is I wanna create a couple of other lines. So I'm gonna zoom in here, and I'm gonna snap right over here, then make a line this direction, and then that line's gonna be, again, my tangency line, kind of the same thing we were doing before. I'm gonna make that construction geometry.

13:14

And then again, create another line from here, come down here and then that direction, and then that line right there is gonna be for construction. All right. Now, next thing is we're gonna say, hey, let's take this, actually this line and this line are also going to be for construction. So turn those two construction lines. Okay, now we wanna create that tangent arc, right? So here's my arc, I wanna snap from there, and I wanna snap over here to the circle.

13:45

Right, and just kind of leave it as is right now. Same thing on the top side here. Let's go ahead and snap from there out to the circle and then define something like that. Then we can say, hey, this line here, hold down shift, that line there, I'm gonna make them tangent, right? And we need that line to be able to do that, right? Because otherwise you're just gonna say, well, what do you wanna make it tangent to? You have to have something tangent to it, right? So, but this line here, of course.

14:16

We wanna go and modify this sketch. Couple things are going on here that are bad, right? So one, this, we forgot to snap, right? So I wanna lock that back to the origin, right? So it's starting right at the point. Then if I grab this point here, I should be able to slide this thing around, and I wanna make sure that this line here, hold down shift, and that line there, those guys are tangent, right?

14:39

Same thing over here. This line here, this line here. Oh, that's a point, sorry. Let's go this line, that circle, make them tangent, okay? Now notice what happened over here is even though we made these tangent and these tangent, actually this is not tangent down here, so we'll click on this one here, hold down Shift and go ahead and say these are tangent. Now we've kinda got what we're looking for, but this is not where it's supposed to be, right? And that's because

15:07

We didn't lock that down with the dimension or didn't snap it, right? So I can, of course, I can go bring back over here, bring that back where they're supposed to be, snap them down. And of course, when you're working on a design, you're gonna forget things, right? It's okay. Go ahead and grab the components, try to move them around, see what's going on. And if you're not getting the shape you're looking for, you can always go back and kind of modify and massage the drawing around as you'd like, right? Come over here, now trim, let's trim this away, trim that away. Now, here's a little bit of thing that's kind of going on in here, is one is normally you'd,

15:37

kind of cut this away over here, right? But really, we wanna cut the outside away, not the inside, right? So that's a little bit weird. So what we probably wanna do is actually create some shape that's outside of this boundary to be my cutting tool. So let's go ahead and just use a line. I'm gonna snap here, and I'm just gonna make something that is bigger than my shape, right? It doesn't matter how big it is, as long as it's bigger. Now, of course, you could define exactly how much bigger it is.

16:04

if you want to be really fancy. And I'd probably recommend doing that, just making sure that you don't, it's never gonna, like if you modify the design, it's not going to.

16:15

It's not gonna interfere, right? So if you say, let's just make this one inch bigger, that's fine. Same thing over here, you can say, hey, this line here, it's gonna be one inch, and this line over here, make it also one inch. So now it's always gonna be one inch bigger on all those different sides, and now we can machine or cut this away from our design. So here's, if you look at this, shapes is gonna kinda come up here and just slice it away. But I don't wanna just slice one side, I wanna slice both sides, right? So.

16:43

Again, we wanna use that mirror command, right? So the transform here is the mirror command. I wanna mirror this whole thing and I wanna mirror over this line, right? Click OK. And that's what we're gonna use to cut this shape away. So let's go ahead and just choose this shape. Hold down Shift, select that shape and just drag it up through my shape. And notice it does, it just trims it away. How long does that make it a little bit taller? Boom, easy. Look, pretty nice, right?

17:12

And there's my shape, right? So you can see how here's my extrusion and I'm cutting through the shape. And it looks pretty good. Now notice a couple things I don't like though. Look right here. Something's going on here. That doesn't look good. So maybe what we wanna do is we wanna bring that in. So maybe this is not the perfect shape. If I go back to that sketch, right? Maybe we wanna bring this in slightly. So it does, let's try 7.4. Notice if I bring it in 7.4, it kinda rounds it.

17:39

Let's say it was 7.45 maybe. See what happens there, we're getting closer, right? So 7....

17:49

uh, 49?

17:53

You know, we're getting closer and closer. For some reason, I'm not sure why that is not, that should be lining up like perfectly, but for some reason it's not. But we can go back and massage, we can design and change these things around as needed, because of the way we're creating this shape, we can go back and modify as needed and adjust. Okay, now the next thing I wanna do is probably take this shape, because it looks a little bit sharp right now, we wanna round these things off, we wanna add some fillets. Right, so hit F on the keyboard,

18:23

And I can choose a line like this one right here. And if I drag this down, or I can type in a value, I can say, hey, I wanna go in or out. And notice that kind of propagates around the shape. It's picking those tangent edges.

18:37

And if it looks okay, click okay. So I can go, hey, this looks okay, but I've only got that. So now right over here is my fillet. I can always go back to that fillet and I can say, hey, I wanna pick some more edges. So what are my other edges I can choose? So it allows you to go back and modify your shape as you go. And pretty much that's all you have to do. That side and that side, it picks all the shapes. And now you've got this kind of a little bit smoother shape. Maybe you wanna make this bigger. How about like 0.7? Well, it doesn't like that. So, oh.

19:07

because of course you have to put the point part. Point seven.

19:23

Let's undo that. Something's going on.

19:46

All right. All right, so for some reason there, that's having a little issue. Let me just click on this edge here. We'll try that again. Click over here is done. And like I said, that's pretty solid right now. We can always come back to it and modify it later if we need to make it adjust a little bit more here. But right now, we're looking pretty solid. So right over here, I wanna now create my next shape. So right over here is sketch two, let's hide that one. I wanna create another sketch right here at the bottom. Click on this one here.

20:16

spin it around and now I wanna create those couple posts. So here's my post. We're gonna start with a circle, but before we get to the circle, let's start with a line. I'm gonna create a line here, and the line I'm gonna make, just going out to the side, that dimension wants to be two, so I'm gonna choose this surface, or not surface, but that line itself.

20:41

Grab that two inches, boom. All right, and I wanna make sure we're snapping right there to the origin. Make one more line, go in the other direction. Also two, boom. All right, keep those two together. And now let's go ahead and create those circles. So put a C right there. And two of those. Let's make them the same. So hold down Shift, select both of those and say those guys are going to be equal.

21:08

Right, and then we wanna define a diameter. In this case, I'm gonna say this is, they're both gonna be 1.75. Bam, all right. Now, let's take those. Because we've got them already defined, I can then choose this one and hold down Shift and select that guy and let's just drag them up. Now, notice what happens here. As I get closer, it thinks I'm trying to cut through my shape here, but just go ahead and don't do that. Right, let's just go ahead and say, hey, I'm gonna make them a slightly lower. That's fine, right?

21:38

Click OK, we're done. But when I get back over to the extrusion, notice I can twirl it down, and I can say, I wanna actually make that like 2.5, right? And maybe a little higher, let's make it three. Right, so now what's happening is those two things are intersecting. And later on, we're gonna combine those together using a Boolean add. But right now, let's just make those so they intersect to each other, okay? Now, the next thing is gonna make the base plate, right? So I'm gonna create a sketch. Come down here, click on the bottom. And this time I'm gonna use this ellipse, right?

22:08

My little ellipse I'm gonna use, it's gonna be 4.5 by two. So here's my ellipse, and I'm gonna start here at the center, and I'm gonna grab it, something like that, and type it out. So it's not going the right way. So I'm gonna click over here, I'm gonna say that's gonna be 4.5, right? And this one here, we wanna make that two, right? That's about the shape we're looking for, okay? And then again, just spin it around in 3D, and I'm gonna say I'd like to just grab that whole shape.

22:38

and just bring it up a little bit, right? So, and you know, the dimension here is not super critical but I'm gonna type in 0.75, right? Now at this point in time, you may wanna go back and add maybe some draft to that surface and split it off with something. But in this case, we'll just leave it as is because we're gonna probably modify the shape a few times as we go through design. How about chamfer? Click on this edge right here and there's our fillet, right? I can just grab this and drag it out. So I can radius it or fillet your choice. So I'm gonna go ahead and type in like a small fillet.

23:08

0.1875, looks pretty good there. And then how about a nice fillet on those bottom surfaces there, right? So how about like this edge right here? Let's go ahead and fillet that. But look what's happening. I'm trying to fillet it, right? But I'm trying to fillet between this part and that part, but it's actually only filleting that other part right there. So hit Escape, that's not what we wanted to undo that, right? We haven't added these things together, right? These are all individual bodies, right? So.

23:38

We want to go ahead and take these tools and we want to create, we want to bring them together. So we want to create a union of those bodies. And the bodies I want to create and bring them all together are these ones here. Click on that. And then all of a sudden I've got one body. Here's body number four, because I've Boolean added those guys together. So notice over here it says Boolean one. Now, want to go back to that fillet command. Hit the fillet.

24:06

Come over here, when I drag this out, notice that now it's filleting between the two, actually between the same part, because all one part, now I can create fillets between. If it was multiple parts, it's not gonna allow you to do that. So right over here, I can choose a couple different things. Right, and of course you can say okay first and then go back and edit that fillet again, right? So here's my edges, I can go back and say, hey, I want that edge too. How about spinning this thing around and choosing some of these edges inside of here.

24:34

And sometimes you might have to actually go in and if it's not doing tangent propagation perfectly, is just go ahead and select each of these edges as you go around the part. So just spin it around.

24:51

And sometimes it's actually quite a bit easier if you are adding these as a modification to the original fillet, because they just stay active, right? So that you're just adding the edges, so you don't have to hold down Shift to select them, right? Because you're just kind of selecting as you go. And so I'm just gonna grab that one there, spin it around and...

25:13

The last one here, boom, okay. Click on done and there's my fillet, right? So of course, anything you wanna modify, you can always go back and look at the tree here. Look at the history and make those modifications. Okay, so that's pretty much it, right? There's my shape, it's looking pretty good. We've got all different things here we can look at, we can back modify if you didn't like those fillets, those radiuses, of course you can look and make those changes.

25:39

Sometimes like we did have a little issue earlier, if you try to make a fillet too big and it starts exploding geometry, you may have to make an adjustment to that or modify the way you're doing it. But again, we're trying to learn the skills and techniques to kind of make these more complex shapes, right? These are gonna have some taper to them, they have some draft to them, and they're not gonna be perfect the first time. You're gonna have to go back and adjust and play with them a little bit to get to those final shapes you may be looking for.

26:05

So that's why having that history bar is really handy. So you can go back and just kind of look at these things and make those modifications. Now to finish this part off or this design off, let's go ahead and just go ahead up here to modeling, coming down here to visualization and let's go ahead and let's add some materials, right? So instead of all materials, let's add a metal and this one I'm gonna go down here. I'm gonna say, well.

26:32

I want aluminum, I want galvanized steel, that's what we want. Drop that directly on there. How about an environment? Yeah, make it like a cream environment is fine. Or I think that's what I used the other day for the first one is I just changed it to like a blue shape or a gray shape, something in the background looks nice. Right, you can change the light intensity over here and make it a little bit brighter or less. You can rotate that around, notice where that shadow is kind of following that part around, make, you know, see something that looks pretty good.

27:02

Um, put it wherever it is and click on done. And there's our part, right? I can, of course, uh, take a picture. I can change different views, but different things for that final part. Anyways, that is my doc cleat. Uh, it's a cast part. It's got draft. It has a lot of different skills that we've learned as far as creating somewhat complex geometry and using some helper lines, some construction geometry, some tangencies, things like that. Uh, so hopefully you learned something and thanks for watching.