Tutorial 4 – SolidWorks Drawings

In this tutorial you will learn how to make machine shop-ready drawings for parts modeled in
SolidWorks. The first part of this tutorial covers drawing and dimensioning individual parts; the
second part shows how to draw an assembly. This tutorial assumes that you have a basic working
knowledge of SolidWorks; that is, that you can make simple parts without difficulty.

The most important purpose of creating a mechanical drawing

is to enable another person, most likely a machinist or mold-
maker, to realize your ideas in the manner you intend. It
follows that all information necessary to define a part must be
somewhere on the drawing. If you fail to include information
on a drawing the machininst will be forced to use his/her
imagination in making a part, often with unhappy results.

For this tutorial we will draw the engine block of the simple
desktop engine model shown at right. The block is made of
plexiglas, and has holes for the piston, crank pins and mounting
screws. All of the parts in the assembly can be found on the
course wiki.

Creating the Drawing

We are now ready to create a drawing of the engine block. In creating a drawing you have the
choice of starting with a blank sheet of paper, using the SolidWorks drawing template or using your
own template. Using the blank sheet of paper requires you to recreate all of the “boilerplate”
drawing info (scale, part name, tolerances, etc.) from scratch each time, which is tedious. The
SolidWorks drawing template is probably the “correct” one to use in practice, but it has way more
information on it than we normally need here at Rowan. I have created a simplified drawing
template as a starting point for you; you can modify it to suit your needs. To use it download the
drawing file “Rowan Drawing Template.SLDDRW” from the wiki. Use Save As to create your own
drawing file.

Zoom in on the information block at the lower right. There are several important pieces of
information in this box, including the name of the part, its material, the drawing number and scale,
the quantity of parts to make, your name and the date. Note the box showing tolerance
information. In this tolerancing system the number of decimal places in a dimension controls how
tight the tolerance is. The system shown here is fairly standard, with three decimal places indicating
a tolerance of ± one thousandth of an
inch. Some systems have three
decimal places indicating ±0.005; it is
up to you to decide. Only specify tight
tolerances where they are needed! Each
additional decimal place adds a factor
of 10 to the cost of producing a part.

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To change any part of the information box first right-click anywhere on the sheet and select Edit
Sheet Format. To change any of the text, double-click on it. To change the font, uncheck the Use
Document’s Font dialog box and click the Font button. Now change the text in the information
block to suit your drawing. Once you are finished, zoom out to view the entire sheet, right-click and
select Edit Sheet.

To put your part into the drawing, select the View Layout tab and pick Model View. Select the
Engine Block model and click on the blue arrow at the top of the dialog box to go to the next
screen. In the dialog box that comes up, pick the Back View, since many of the important parts of
the engine block (i.e. the tapped holes at the bottom) are seen from the back. Click on the screen to
place the view. By default, none of the views have hidden lines displayed. To display hidden lines in
a view, click on the border of the view and select the Hidden in Gray icon.

Now, click the Projected View button on the Model View tab, and click the back view you just
created. When you move the mouse below the back view, you’ll see a side view appear, and when
you move the mouse beside the back view, a view from the other side appears. Click below and to
the side of the back view to place the other two views. Finally, click diagonally from the back view
to create an isometric illustration.

To move a view select its border and drag it to the desired location. Note that the three views
always maintain alignment with each other; in other words, you can’t move the lower view left to
right and you can’t move the rightmost view up and down. To move all three views at once, click
on the border of the upper left view and drag it.

To correctly dimension a drawing we need to first decide upon two things: a reference point and
how many dimensions we need to fully define the part. You must choose one reference point for a
part and define all dimensions from this point. This practice will make your parts more accurate and
easier (cheaper) to produce. There are exceptions to this rule, but they are for parts more
complicated than you are likely to make at Rowan.

Choosing a good reference point can also make the difference between easy and difficult
production. Wherever you can you should take advantage of symmetry since it is easy to set up a
milling machine to find the centerline of a part. For the engine block a logical reference point is the
centerline of the bore at the bottom face. Every feature of the engine block is symmetric about this
point so we need a reduced number of dimensions to define the part.

We’ll start by dimensioning the back view. Using the Annotation tab and Smart Dimension,
dimension the drawing until it looks like the
figure at right. To define the tapped hole use
the Hole Callout button on the Annotations
toolbar. Use the Centerline tool to add a
horizontal and vertical centerline to the drawing.

Note that in using the center of the block as a

reference point we only needed five dimensions
to define this view. Now dimension the other
views until they look like the figure below.

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Creating an Exploded Assembly View
To show how an assembly fits together it is often helpful to create an exploded view. Open the
assembly file Engine Assembly.SLDASM and choose Exploded View from the Assembly tab.
You can choose to have SolidWorks “AutoExplode” the assembly for you, but if you want more
control you should explode each part individually. Follow these steps to explode a part.

1. Select the component you wish to explode.

2. Click and drag the colored arrow that points in the direction you wish to move.
3. To explode another component, simply click it, and drag its arrow as far as you want.

If you want to change the amount a component has moved, you can simply click on the explode
step, and drag the blue arrow that appears. If you want more than one component to move when
you drag it, hold down the CTRL key while selecting the components.

Now open up a new drawing sheet and use the Model View tool on the View Layout tab to insert
a view of the engine assembly. In the second dialog box that appears, put a checkmark in Current
Model View, so that the exploded view will appear on the screen. You may need to change the scale
that the exploded view appears; to do so, select the Use Custom Scale radio button and select your
new scale.

You can attach part numbers to the drawing by selecting the Balloon button from the Annotations
tab. Choose Tight Fit for the size and Custom for the Balloon Text, then enter in part numbers as
needed. To make a simple bill of materials, you can create the annotation using the Note tool in the
Annotations tab. To complete this drawing, create the part names shown in the figure below.

Here’s a fun hint: you can make a table in Excel and copy and paste it into a SolidWorks drawing.
This way you can neatly format a Bill of Materials for your assembly view and then paste it into
SolidWorks. SolidWorks also has a Bill of Materials feature, but I haven’t had much luck with it.

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Finally, to “unexplode” the assembly, click on the ConfigurationManager tab at the top of the
FeatureManager, expand the Default icon and right-click ExplView1. Select Collapse. Note
that your exploded view is still saved, you can re-explode it by right-clicking and selecting Explode.