Playing with this (to me) new block belt/chain feature, I found you actually CAN make a layout involving more than one sprocket- this is pretty cool! (In terms of bicycle design, this may only come in handy when designing a tandem bike). Just make sketch points in the block sketches and use them to constrain multiple sprockets (blocks) so that they must rotate as one. They'll still be separate blocks, and can be then paired up
This an interesting block feature that I've never actually noticed and so consequently have never tried (I'm self-taught- and this shows one of the shortcomings of learning that way). Not sure why this feature exists in the Part mode of SW, since the animation of moving components would seem to be more appropriate as an assembly feature than a part feature (?). Having just tried this feature out on my own, I HAVE notice that you might be out of luck if you wanted to try to work out a mutli-gear race bike this way, though- it seams a chain block can have only one circle. I think doing this in an assembly would then work better for something like that, maybe?
So you've done a layout inside a multi-body part (with 16 bodies) instead of a layout in an assembly. Any advantage to doing this or doesn't it matter which one you use? Good video by the way and thanks.
Hello Phillip, The main reason I chose to create this model as a part file, rather than an assembly file, is because bike frames like this BMX frame are always welded together, essentially becoming a single part in the end. Creating it as a part file will allow you to take advantage of the Weldment tools in SOLIDWORKS and have a Cut List table automatically generated. These layout based sketch techniques can certainly be applied in an assembly environment as well, and individual part files can be created based on a single assembly layout sketch. Of course creating this bike frame as an assembly would mean that each individual tube would need to be saved with a unique file name, so there would be a little more file management involved. I hope this information is helpful.
Video was good, but some of the things you did, especially the creation of the 3d seat, was glossed over and done very quickly with no explanation of what was being done or what tools were being used.
Graham S Hey Graham, The goal of the video was show an example of how a single 2D sketch could be used to control the geometry of a part model. So the layout design was the main focus, and certainly some of the other details in the video were glossed over. To create the 3D geometry from the block, I simply started a new 2D sketch on a reference plane, selected the block of the seat, used the Convert Entities sketch tool to convert the block into sketch entities, and then extruded the sketch into 3D using the Boss Extrude tool. Hope that helps. Thanks for watching!
