FreeCAD for Beginners #17 - Creating the assembly with Assembly4 workbench

[Music] in this video we're going to bring everything together assemble the engine and we put it to a vote with my patrons and they said they'd like to see it assembled in assembly four and assembly three well today we're only going to be able to do assembly four it's going to take that long um i don't want to do both in one long video be way too long so we're just going to do assembly for today and we're going to start out by creating a new file and creating a new assembly and then we're going to bring all the parts in along the way i'm going to show you how i manage um the parts how i bring them together how i make sure i can keep track of everything and you'll see it gets quite complicated even though there's only a few parts it gets quite complicated and make sure you have the right ends of each piece and how you have them all lined up so without further ado let's get on and have a look at that and see how we do it so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to go into assembly 4 you'll see that if you don't have assembly 4 listed here what you may have to do is go to tools and add-on manager and then under add-on manager you may have to find that workbench and when you click on it you can install it and that will give you the assembly for add-on and if you look in this whole list you'll see all the other workbenches that you can add of course there's many of them but assembly four is the one we're working with today i'm gonna close that and we're gonna go to assembly four once you've added it'll appear in that list and then in assembly 4 we're going to start a new file and inside this file we're going to create a new assembly when you create an assembly it has a list of or a folder of parts and then the model itself which is the assembly model first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to save this i'm going to say save as and i already have a file i already been playing around with it so the engine assembly 4 is what i'm going to save it as and i'm just going to go ahead and replace that one because it was just a blank file and so i have my file empty it has an lcs and if you remember in the other video we did on assembly 4 you can create a master sketch and lay out your lcs is in that sketch if you want to i'm not going to do that for this because i'm only going to put one piston in to my cylinder head and i'm going to align it all as we go so let's take a look at first we're going to start out by opening our existing file remember from the previous video we have the small engine file and a small engine file has our piston conrod and what i call the small end brief explanation on that small end so there is sometimes a small end bearing in there but also sometimes it's just this wrist pin or gauging pin that holds that piston on so technically that pin should really be called a wrist pin or a gauging pin and then the bearing would be on that now i'm not going to mess around changing it i'm just going to leave it as the smaller baron but essentially i'm referring to that pin and the bearing itself and then finally we have the crankshaft which we modeled as well all in this small engine file so if you haven't seen where that small engine file came from you need to go back to videos so this is 17 that would be 15 if you go back to the beginner number 15 that's where we created all these parts and you'll see how to do it if you haven't seen that you might get a little lost in this assembly okay first things first anytime you get this little check mark next to your part it means it wants a refresh so i'm just going to refresh it then i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to turn off everything but the piston so here's the piston and that's the piece that we want to be aligning remember to turn these parts off i just select it and hit the spacebar that turns them on and off okay so first thing i'm going to do small engine i'm going to create a new part and then i'm going to create a second new part and a third new part and the reason i'm doing that is i'm going to separate these bodies out this single part into their own parts ready for assembly so i'm going to take this part and i'm going to rename it i'm going to call it part piston and i'm going to leave the piston body in that part i'm going to take this one right click rename and i'm going to call it part conrod and you guessed it i'm going to take that conrod body and i'm going to drop it into that part um conrod part and then i'm going to rename this next one i'm going to rename that to part small n bearing i'm going to rename the last one to part crankshaft so now i have all the parts i'm going to take the small m bearing literally i'm just clicking on it hold down the left button and drop it into my small end bearing part and i'm going to click on that crankshaft and i'm going to drop that in the crankshaft part and if you wanted to see what happened so inside the crankshaft now is the crankshaft body inside the small end is the small end body conrod is the conrod body so now we have separate parts for each body so somebody did ask the question should i have created them in separate parts you can create them in separate parts you can create them all in one part because you can easily separate them and put them in the tree but for assembly we need them to be in their own parts so we're going to assemble parts together and so it's important that they're in their own parts now i'm going to go back to the piston i'm going to make that there the current part so to do that the active part you just double click it and you see it highlights now what we need to do for assembly we need to have an in assembly for i should be clear that this is the assembly four way of doing things so assembly four uses local coordinate systems to align everything so you're just gonna align the coordinate systems on top of each other and so the way to do that with with assembly 4 is you just create the local coordinate system where you naturally would assemble this part now if we think about the piston the piston is connected to the wrist pin or the small and bearing part across here but it's also connected to the con rod it's going to be connected to the comrade with that wrist pin so we can either align it on the wrist pin or we can align it on the conrad it doesn't matter but we're probably going to want to align it in the center here in the center of these holes so i'm going to show you how to set up an lcs for that so let's do that and i can do it a number of ways but i'm going to do it this way so we select piston and in assembly 4 we select create a new coordinate system in a part click that and i'm going to call this um lcs is going to be called i'm just i'm actually going to go all the way back here i'm going to call it lcs piston and then bearing then i'm going to select this diameter i'm going to flip this guy around and i'm going to select this diameter then i'm going to pick inertial cs and i'm going to quickly have a look and see that my lcs you can see it there if i zoom in you can see the lcs is sitting there this is the z direction and this is the x direction this is the y direction so i want my z direction pointing up which it is so that's all good and i'm just going to apply that say okay and now i have an lcs that's piston bearing so that i know where that one is and so that's going to attach it to the conrod now the other thing that we're going to want to do is we are going to we're going to want to align this piston inside the bore and to do that we probably want an lcs on the top in the in the middle of this circle so so now what we're going to do is we'll select the piston again i'm going to say add an lcs and we're going to call this lcs piston and 4. and now i'm just going to select that circle and i'm going to select concentric and once more my z is pointing up so that's perfect i'm going to say apply and say okay and again it wants to refresh so i'm just going to refresh that and now you can see if i am locating this piston i can locate on this lcs and i can locate on the lcs underneath so i can locate on that lcs too so from the point of view of assembly now i can assemble it into the bore and i can assemble it on the end of the conrod so that's all i'm going to do with the piston take that out close that i'm going to go to conrod now so here's the conrod i want to be able to assemble on this diameter and this diameter so i need two lcs's we're going to put an lcs in this small part and so i'm going to select conrod select the lcs i'm going to call this conroad small you can call it anything you like that you'll recognize but you know the more descriptive you are the better it's going to be for you i'm just going to select that circle and i'm going to say inertial cs i'm going to take a quick look inside and you can see that my z is pointing down and my x is pointing up so i want to rotate on that y let me uh set let me zoom in there let's bring that over if you see the green guy here the one i'm highlighting that's the y so i want to rotate around that y 90 degrees so i'm going to do that right now and now my x is pointing up and so everything looks good i'm going to say apply say okay refresh now i'm just going to relocate this guy so i can do the same thing on this one but i'm going to do big i'm going to call this one big so we're going to call it lcs con rod big that's the big end so let's go there we're gonna go with this guy i'm gonna run that around once go with this guy inertial cs i'm going to take a look inside once more my z is not pointing up so i'm going to rotate that 90 around y again that's much better say apply say okay so now we have the conrod and the piston and they are both have two lcs's for us to locate things now i'm going to just carry on and do the same for each of these pieces so let's go ahead and we'll do the next one i'm just going to hit spacebar to get rid of that guy gonna double click this spacebar on the body let's just bring that into view there it is up there and i'm gonna just do the same thing on this guy i'm going to hit here and here make sure my lcs is pointing up so let's do that i'm going to hit this this is just small and bearing i'm just going to i'm just going to take the word part out and the reason i'm doing that is it just makes the world longer and i don't need to do that so again you can call it whatever you are comfortable with so for this one let me hit this guy rotate this around i'm gonna hit this guy i'm gonna say inertial cs take a quick look down the end there this one doesn't really matter as long as the z is pointing towards the edge which it is so i'm okay with that we're gonna say okay to that and now that has an lcs so that all looks good and then for the crankshaft remember we want to locate the begin on that so i'm gonna turn the small end off and i'm gonna turn the crankshaft on let's bring it to the middle oh press the button there zoom in and i'm just going to do the center of this guy here so if you watch i'll show you what i'm doing so we've got to select crankshaft we're going to add an lcs we're going to call this one crankshaft right and again it doesn't really matter what you call it as long as you can remember what it is that guy and then the next edge is going to be that guy inertial cs now i can see my z is pointing out sideways so again i want to rotate it 90 degrees in x i'm sorry in the y-axis and now it's pointing downwards so i actually want it to be minus 90. that's better so you can see it right there let's zoom in you can't see until i zoom out actually so there i wanted to be in line with this guy so that's basically the right answer right there so apply say okay now remember the the way this thing's all got line up is through those lcs's so if you don't have them point in the right direction the way that you want um you're going to have difficulty doing the lineups all right so now we can it doesn't really matter what they all look like we have a way of lining them up so now what we're going to do is we're going to get back into our engine assembly and we're going to start to assemble some parts i select on the model and i say insert and you can see right away i have small engine part piston small engine part conrod small engine part small and bearing small engine pop crankshaft so the first one i want to put in is the piston so i'm going to insert that when i do that i have two lcs's to choose from remember my bearing one is the piece that goes around this part so it's this guy down here so i'm going to select that and then i'm going to put this in on the parent assembly and just put it in on the lcs origin and say okay and now our model has just a piston in it the next thing i'm going to do is add um the wrist pin or the gudgeon or the smaller bearing whatever you want to call i've been calling it smaller bearing so i'm going to continue to do that so i'm going to go small and bearing insert smaller bearing lcs i want it to be attached to the piston and i want it to be attached to the piston bearing and now it looks like i have an issue there because well looks like i'm gonna have to rotate it 90 in the y and 90 in there you go twice 90 in the y so so not a big deal but it would have come in straight if i had to put the lcs in the right place but that puts it where we want it to be so you can see it's now located right through the piston so if i say okay to that now i have two pieces assembled that's nicely set in the middle now we want to put our conrod around there so let's select that model and we'll say link part it's going to be the conrod we're going to insert that we're going to get conrod small so remember that's the small end of it and we're going to connect that to we can actually connect it to the smaller bearing or we can connect it to the piston i'm going to put it in the piston and piston bearing that's where i want that to be so my conrod is in there that i somehow managed to switch off the pocket that's actually the conrod so we'll just turn that guy back on there's my conrod sitting in exactly the right place we want it that all looks good and then the final thing we need to add is our crankshaft and we will do that now model insert part crankshaft insert conrod big there it is sitting there that's very good say okay and there we have our crankshaft we have our conrod our piston and our smaller bearing all in this assembled model so the next parts are a cylinder head a cylinder and a spark plug and if you check out beginner number 16 you will find that beginner number 16 has those parts in it so i'm just going to open up that file and that is called cylinder block and in opening that file we can switch on our cylinder block switch on our cylinder head switch on our spark plug and we can see all our parts together one thing i did um think about is in our cylinder head before i go any further let me um actually let me turn off my cylinder block let me turn off my spark plug and go into this sketch and i just want to make this 35 instead of 25 otherwise it won't clear the spark plugs so i'm just going to do that before i do anything else there we go all right i did notice that when i was i was looking at the assembly okay so what we got to do for this is we're going to do the same process that we just did so i'm going to go in my cylinder block and i'm going to create a platform cylinder head and a part for the cylinder uh the spark plug so we are gonna do that we can do that from here it's okay and we're gonna change this one to be part cylinder block i'm gonna change this one to be par cylinder head and we're going to change this one to be part spark plug perfect and then we're just going to grab i'm going to close that one up so you can see so i'm just going to grab this body the cylinder head body drop it in part cylinder head spark plug body part spark plug and you'll see that they're all in there perfectly and now we just got to do the same things and create all our lcs's so let's turn off our cylinder head let's go back in here and turn on our cylinder block and i think the first thing we want to do with the cylinder block is we're going to create an lcs just here so at the top of this bore in the middle will be perfect so let's go back into that assembly for when i did the modification to the cylinder head it automatically switched me back to part design so just make sure if you do anything like that that you're in the right workbench otherwise you're gonna struggle a little bit okay so parts on the block gonna hit that i'm gonna call this i'm actually gonna call it cylinder block boar seal in the block and i'm just literally just going to pick this guy say concentric and my z is pointing up so that's all good say okay and refresh turn off that guy turn on this guy and i'm just going to flip him up this way i want to put one right on that guy so here's what we're going to do it's going to go right here in this diameter so we'll select this on the head put in this guy we're going to call this cylinder silver in the head or how about that and we hit that we just want that line there we're going to say concentric and we can see our z is pointing up again so that everything looks good there we can apply and say okay and then i want to get that cylinder head i'm now going to put one in for the spark plug and that's just going to be in this area here so i can pick the top of that thread or i can pick this diameter it doesn't really matter because it's going to be concentric so i'm going to pick some of the head put another lcs so i'm going to call this cylinder head spark plug and i'm just going to select got to select this guy here let me go with that diameter and say it's concentric so just pointing up say okay and there's my cylinder head done so i'm going to turn off my cylinder head i'm going to turn on my spot plug that out turn on my spark plug and i just for this assembly i just need something in the bottom here so it's just going to be right around there and we're going to move that up so we'll just select our spark plug i'm just going to call this bot plug and say select this diameter on the top most diameter if i can get it let's zoom in a bit that one concentric and i'm going to assume that that's pointing upwards i think it will be but if it's not we can always adjust okay so now i should be able to get back in my engine assembly and i should be able to link another part and you can see all the cylinder block parts are here so part cylinder block say insert cylinder block and that's the cylinder block bore and i want to do that on my part piston my piston board and if we look that looks pretty good i think we'll say okay to that so now we have the cylinder block in and the cylinder block hair is inside of the or around the piston and then we're going to put the head on i just noticed my cylinder block doesn't have my fins on it i'm not sure why that's the case so i'll look at that later i'm not worried about it for now we're just showing you how to put the parts together so let's go add another piece to my model cylinder block part head insert that head bore it's gonna go on my cylinder block poor and you can see that that is exactly where we want it to go so let's say okay and then we're going to select the model we're going to insert another part it's going to be the spark plug we're going to say insert spot plug we're going to put it on the cylinder block oh sorry cylinder head plug and i was wrong my z is the wrong way up if you look if we zoom in so as i said we can fix that um we can rotate on y i think twice and that should give us exactly what we want and then we can say okay to that and now our spot plug fits in our head is on so when the block is on and we have a complete assembly okay so now we have that let's just check why we haven't got these fins showing here because we did create them so let's go back in our cylinder block this is our cylinder block model and if i look in our cylinder block model ah there it is you see i have the pad is highlighted it should be the subtractive pipe and that gives us our fins back and then if i go back into my assembly you can see the fins are all there now so that's all perfect all looks good uh i didn't actually put fins in the head yet or bothered to do that so not worry you can see my cylinder is good the bore in the cylinder is a bit bigger than the piston because you would have piston rings on there i didn't model those but we could and we could add them the crankshaft's in the right place everything looks good and one thing i will show you that you can do i believe you can do it once you already assembled it is you can say random color for each of these pieces and what it'll do is it'll randomize some colors for them and it just it helps you to see the assembly a little bit and then so if i go with my crankshaft random color and my cylinder block a random color and missing the head a random color and of course you can pick colors if you want to and the spark plug a random color there we go if i just zoom into where it is now you can see all the parts a little better that you you can see what's what because they're all set up with different colors you can of course go in and you can change the colors around do whatever you want to do so hopefully that helps you to create an assembly in assembly 4 from a number of various parts and i took it from the point of view of we're creating parts that we didn't know necessarily we were going to put them in an assembly so we didn't worry about that at the beginning because you don't always know that you want to make an assembly and you don't always know exactly how you're going to lay things out and so you know it's a it's a good thing to be able to to see how you might possibly um set this up and and get it back to where you want it to be in terms of being able to manage it now one thing i will tell you is in assembly four you can do this parts list and if i hit that you'll see my bill of materials they call that bill of materials it's kind of yeah it's okay um but it tells me that all the pieces that i have in here so you can do that you can copy those out so you can have a list of all the parts that you have in your assembly now as far as the assembly is concerned yeah i could animate it i don't think i can animate this shaft and make that turn around i just think the shaft will turn around but it won't pull the thing down so um the animation in in certainly in uh certainly in assembly four is not as intricate and exact as you might like to be able to create that ascent that um animation what i would do personally if i was creating this animation i would take this and put it in blender and then i would do the animation in blender we'll take a look remember we're going to do assembly three so when we do assembly three what we'll do is we'll we'll check and see what that can do in terms of animations i'll be honest with you i haven't done any animations in assembly three i have done something assembled before but it's more of a straight line linear actuation that i've done and i don't think it's worth the effort to put all the time in to get the rest of the animation somebody else may think it that it is and and if that's the case um then certainly they you know you might want to leave me a comment below and i'll i'll take a look and see if that's something that's cool uh one thing i was just looking at is probably i should have assembled this with the cylinder and head at 90 degrees so that this cylinder goes over this part again you can do that when you're creating the assembly as you're putting things together i didn't do that i only just noticed it so that's why i didn't do it and i'm not going to spend the time to do it now so it's pretty easy to change if you want to okay so if you've enjoyed this video please give us a like and if you haven't already please subscribe to the channel there's loads more stuff coming out obviously we're going to do the next video it's going to show this whole assembly but in assembly 3 and we'll be doing that in version 0.2 i am currently running and i should have told you this at the beginning but i am currently running version 0.19 it's the 24291 git the latest release that was available when i downloaded and i haven't moved to 0.2 yet but i will use that to do the assembly 3. okay thanks to all my patrons who have helped me to come up with the ideas and and uh you know the the content for the videos they certainly have some great suggestions i appreciate them and i appreciate them coming up with suggestions and i'm absolutely gonna um create videos around their suggestions as they're kind enough to support me so thanks again and i'll see you in the next one you

Channel: Adventures in creation

Views: 30,633

Keywords: FreeCAD, CNC, CAD, CAM, CNC routing, Design, DIY, woodworking, 3D printing, maker, creativity, art, crafts, Blender, Inkscape, Prusa Slicer, OBS

Id: nNh_cNmuSAU

Length: 35min 57sec (2157 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 07 2021