From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2024 Essential Training

Circles and arcs - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2024 Essential Training

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Circles and arcs

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- [Instructor] Let's learn about the circle command. Now the circle is probably one of the more common of the sketch entities and it's a pretty straightforward and simple tool to use. But there are a few little intricacies that I'm going to go over in this video. So the first thing's first, we have a sketch, it's opened up here, and I've got the circle command right here at the top of the screen. If you click on the dropdown, notice, I've got two different types. I have the regular circle and the perimeter circle. And then we're also going to be covering arcs in this video as well. So first things, let's click on that circle. Click where you want to start. Drag out the radius to whatever you want it to be. Notice you got that little R showing the radius to whatever you want it to be. Get close, maybe like that, add a dimension. And now I've got a nice little circle that happens to be two inches in diameter. Now of course, once you've created this, you can grab the center point and drag it around to wherever you want it to be. Pretty straightforward and simple. Okay, the next thing is going to be the perimeter circle, that uses three points. Click on one point, click on another point, and then the third point, it's going to define how big that circle is. Bam, pretty straightforward for that as well. Alright, now how about some arcs? The arcs are a little bit more tricky. The center point arc right here, the first one, click on that one. Click where you want to start in the center, right, and you can define what that radius is. And then once you've created that radius, now you can create a portion of a circle, right? So how much of that arc do you want? And notice you're giving the angle or you're getting the angle right over here. And when you get close to where you want to click, and it's going to add that little arc. Now a little helper for working with arcs I always like to do is come over here to the line command, come over here to the center line, and I like to connect the dots from this side over here, over to here, over to there. And now I can control this a little bit nicer. I can kind of rotate this thing around a little bit, if I want to, grab the end, I can slide it around. I can say something like, hey, this line here, it's going to be for instance, like horizontal, right? Or I can say, hey, I want this corner here or this spot to be fixed. And then I can then rotate or adjust the size and the rotation this way. You can then of course add like a dimension over here, say like one inch. And now I'm starting to get a lot more control over my arc. Now all I need for the last thing here is just a little angle here, something like 30. And now everything's fully defined. So that's how you can use a few helper lines of the construction lines to work with individual arcs. All right, once we've got that one, how about the tangent arc? So the tangent arc's going to start from an existing entity. So right over here, notice I got this arc coming around here. I can choose the ending point there. And notice I can continue on with a tangent arc, right? And depending on which angle you come out of that point at with, you're going to get a tangent arc going in one of those random directions. So you can come back up like this, you can come back down over here and that's going to be your tangent arc and you can keep going with that wherever you want with that nice tangent arc until you're done, hit escape, and now you're done with the tangent arc. You can also start with something just like a basic line, right? And then coming off that line is going to be the tangent arc. And then yes, something like that. So there is your tangent arc coming from there. Alright, next one is going to be the three point arc. So in the three point arc, I'm going to choose where I want to start. I am going to choose where I want to end, and then I can define what that radius is and I can kind of move that around however I want. Click where you want it to be and then if you wanted to grab like that center point and like snap it to the center of this, now you have this arc that kind of goes around the outside of the circle. And if you wanted to hold that in place, you could say, hey, I want to lock that in. And now I can move this arc around that circle and I control it a little bit easier. I definitely recommend adding a couple of those construction lines and something like that to help it out. Or you can snap something like that point there and the end point over there and you could say, hey, those guys are going to be horizontal, right? So now they're in line, and now I have the ability to kind of drag this one around or change the size. And then of course you can use something like a smart dimension and you can dimension what the radius is, or you can dimension from one radius to the next, define what the space is, like half of an inch. Right now all I need to do is control this last little point here. Now of course you can add some other dimensions, but the way you can dimension this is you can choose like a point and then define it over here, or you can choose this point, that point, and you can choose the actual line and it'll actually give you, hold on what happened there, not that, click on the point, click on the other point, and then click over here on the actual arc and it'll actually define what the length of that entire arc is, so that's pretty cool. So 3.5, it's going to define how long the line is. Okay so that's a whole bunch of different cool circles and arcs that you can do inside of SolidWorks. Definitely the circle is one of the more common entities inside of SolidWorks, but definitely arcs are up there as well. So you're going to definitely need to know both of these for working with sketches inside of SolidWorks.

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