Understanding FreeCAD Lesson 1.1 Building a basic part in Part Design Workbench. Beginners Tutorial

hi viewers and welcome to the channel and welcome to the understanding freecad series this is lesson one and we're going to be looking at the part design workflow now this is split over a number of videos so we've got video 1.1 which is going to be looking at drawing a sketch adding constraints and then using the part design to pad the model that we'll be creating in part 1.2 we're going to be looking at an alternative way to do that and that is using the pad and the pocket so we're introducing another aspect of the part design we're going to compare the two resulting models and then refine them and we're going to look at what happens before the refinement and what happens after we're going to be creating a part for a cnc machine or even a 3d printer the construction is the same between these two machines more or less except for the cnc you're going to be using higher powered motors and it cuts rather than adds material to your object we're going to be looking at something called a rail shaft support now this supports a linear rail that's placed on the machine basically the rail we're looking at is a metal bar that supports our access the connector that will actually connect that bar to the machine is going to be simplified so what you'll see is the actual piece will be just the connector without a split and without a sideball hole it takes a bolt in there to clamp that down on the bar to stop it moving we've actually removed that and in another video we'll be adding those features on top of that so there's opportunity to evolve that video to look at more features in the part design and that's what i'm trying to look at with this course and allow a beginner coming to freecad or someone coming from another cad package to learn how freecad works in these separate workbenches so let's have a look at lesson one if you like these videos please subscribe i also have a cofi or coffee donation page and a patreon where you can get extra content the links for those pages can be found in the video description any kind donations will be reinvested back into the channel and to span that further in the same subject matter to bring more quality quantity and to find some future projects that i have in mind that i only can do with your kind donations so there's a number of ways to create this model we're in free hand already and we're going to create a new document so this new document icon here the file new we've got a new document we're going to be first using the part design to create this part and in here through the part design we need to create a body first so every single part in the part design will need a body to hold the sketch and any extrusions pants or pockets that we do after that in part design is called a pad in part is called an extrusion we'll also come to that in the other videos when we start using the part to create the same piece so we can create the body here or use the icon here we've also got the same up here we've got part design and create body so you can see that we've got multiple ways of creating the actual body i do use the menu item or we use the tasks and it's kind of like a wizard it drives us through the process so we're just going to create a body in there and what happens on the model you can see a body has been created with its local coordinate system here come back into tasks and the next process will be to create a sketch in here but because we flip back that's actually disappeared now so we're going to have to create the sketch via this icon create a new sketch so make sure your body is selected and we click on the create a new sketch in there it will ask us to place it in a different plane depending on what we want and you can select the planes from here so we can actually select them so we've got the xy plane here we can use our controls i'm on the touchpad controls here so you can see the different navigation styles if you're used to something like a cad or blender navigation style we can actually slap them from here so on this touch pad control and i know the alt key if i hold that down and use the mouse and just drag across the mouse pad or move the mouse touch pad is for mouse as well so we can see when we hover over touch pad you can see that we've got the mouse and also the touchpad showing there so that shows the navigation style i like this navigation style it's quite intuitive so i'm holding down alt and just moving the mouse like so or dragging my finger across the touchpad and i can select whatever ones we want from here you can see them highlighted left hand side here or i can select them from here you can see them highlighted on the right so i'm going to select the xy plane and hit okay if i was doing this from let me just delete the sketch that's been created and delete this body hitting the delete key on there if i was coming to unnamed and we got the tasks and you can see our wizard is here hold on crate body and then create sketch and then got the same so selecting the xy plane for this project and hitting ok i'm now in the sketcher just going to move myself so i'm pressing the shift key i'm moving that moves me in 3d space so i can move this around that moves me along that plane there i'm going to create the sketch on this plane so remembering back to our technical drawing we know the holes are going to be 200 millimeters apart now there's multiple ways of creating the sketch what happens with sketches in the part design you create one feature and then select the face of that feature and create another feature upon that it's feature based so for instance i'm just going to create a normal square upon here just to show you this would be a feature if i close that if i wanted to pad that i can and then i will select this base and create a sketch upon that face and then create another feature like so close that and i can pad that feature or i can pocket that feature like so that's feature based design in cad so i'm just going to come over to the model and delete that sketch delete that pad and delete that sketch again and we'll go through the features as they appear on here because they're fully parametric and we'll get to that in a moment so we're in our sketch so just delete that sketch xy plane okay we're in our sketch so we're going to create the basis of our sketch now remembering back to the diagram we need to create two holes which we'll be using this circle here create a circle in the sketch i've got my auto constraints on i've gone down here you can see we've got auto constraints that's checked on the task tab auto constraints checked and what that allows me to do is create that circle there you can see there's a point on line constraining there and we look at that you can see on the toolbar this one here fix a point onto an object i didn't actually select that i just hovered over that line now place that constraint you can see that appearing find the mouse pointer you've got the circle showing you what geometry you're using and the point on the line constraint by the side of that so that shows me the the geometry and what's going to happen so point online if i move to that center point there you can see i've got a different geometry coming up and that's the concentric we will be concentric to this but this is coincidence constraint coming up there and also there as well so that will be actually attached to that point in 3d space so we've created that one there if i took this all to constraints off and create the second circle over here you can see we've got no constraints coming up so what we would have to do is create that circle now either you press the right hand mouse button to get your pointer back or you hit the escape key we would have to then take this point so i can drag it click that point click this horizontal line you can see it highlighting it click that horizontal line i haven't used the control key or the shift key to multi-select if i set that horizontal line again that will unselect it select that one and use the point online constraint so you've got additional mouse clicks there so it's always best to click on the auto constraints and leave those selected also this avoid redundant order constraints it's worth selecting two we've got those two circles now and they're on this line and if we try to move this we can see we can't push it up and down it's constrained to that line we need to constrain the radius of these so we click on one click on the other so we've multi select those by clicking on both of those and we can use this constraint here fix the radius of a circle or an arc if we click on that this constraint equal will appear so multi-selecting geometry we can add multiple constraints hit yes that'll add the constraint to both of these circles so unfortunately we can't move this out of the way but it's asking us for the radius constraint for these remember it's radius not diameter so i can place in there 10 millimeters set those for 10 millimeters radius or a 20 millimeter diameter those are now set now but i want to make sure these are a distance apart so i'm going to come in and click that point here of this circle and click this point here and use a fixed horizontal distance between two points click on that and i can fix the horizontal distance for that i'm going to set that one to 200 millimeters now you can see they've been pushed apart i'm just going to use my mouse to to zoom out or using two fingers on the mouse pad and we can check which ones we need to use by just hovering over the touch touch pad and you can see you've got zoom as his middle mouse button or we can use two fingers to zoom out as you can see there i'm using two fingers to zoom out or we could use the shift control and zoom in and out like so but i'm just using two fingers which is the middle mouse button version on the touchpad we need these to be symmetrical we can move these up and down that line you can see them moving up and down that line but we need these to be symmetrical to the center so we're going to add a symmetrical constraint we can also pull these constraints out the way so we can see what we're doing and that shows that point there i'm going to click that point and click this point and then the last point will be the one that will create symmetry with so it's this center line here or this point if i click that point there that's the last point and use the symmetry constraint that is now symmetrical they've been colored green so they've been made fully constrained to that sketch and you can see fully constrained sketch over here we go down we can see our constraints that have been added so that's the first constraint second third etc going down now we've got these fully constrained we can start adding additional geometry now we've got to think about our shape and what we're creating we're creating the basis of our shape so we now need the outer circle so i'm going to use a circle geometry and create a circle sketch in here like so that circle sketch is sitting there now this will be the outer part so i want to constrain the radius of here now i'm going to use a different constraint i'm going to use a constraint diameter so you can see the little drop down here we can constrain the diameter this time and you can see the constraints coming here and this is the outer one so this is 150 millimeters hit okay and let's place that 150 millimeters there and we can see our constraint we can pull this constraint down you can see we've got this constraint going across the circumference rather than across the radius like this one here now we've got this one in i'm going to place some lines in here like so and also an arc so we can come up to the arc tool here create an arcane sketcher there's also another arc end point and rim point but we want to center an endpoint now the way we use this we click on this one you can see our mouse pointers change we need to constrain to the center of this point here because this will be the center point of the arc and then we move up and you can see we've got a circle this won't be a circle but we look towards where we want to place this and remember that the auto constraints until we can constrain to parts now it doesn't matter if we're inaccurate with this because we can use constraints to solve that inaccuracy so i want to create an arc that runs all the way around here so if i click here we just click the mouse button and we can just move this around so i've taken my finger off the mouse button now and i can move that in an arc and we'll just place the arc in here hit escape or press the right mouse button we can get our mouse pointer back and we can move this arc to wherever we want if it wasn't contrained to the center here we could actually move that center point for example create this gain over here like so that center point is there let's just zoom out a bit and i can move that center point i can move these points as well i'm just gonna hit delete after selecting that so we want these points opposite each other because we want 180 degrees of arc so click this point and this point and use the vertical constraint that means when we move this we can move it into position to wherever we want we could even click this point and this point in here and do a vertical straight across there so that's fixed now and it's just the radius that changes and click this radius for this arc so click the arc we're going to add a radius 2 here so i'm going to drop this down and use constrain radius you can see we're starting to get into fully constrained sketches now i'm going to change the radius this to 30 millimeters and hit okay now we need the lines that connect up to here so this point and this arc we're going to create a line that connects to them we're going to use the line tool here create a line in the sketch click on that you can see our pointer has changed to the line and i'm going to hover over that point you can see we're getting a coincident constraint coming up we're going to click it and that's connected to that coincidence constraint now my mouse button is not pressed down i can just move this by dragging my hand over the touch pad or moving the mouse and if we hover over this arc you can see we've got a point on line constraint or a point on object constraint we move again further up the arc and move this about which is a bit awkward i'm just going to move this into site by holding down the shift key and just moving the mouse and if we hover over this you can see we've got another constraint that appears and that's the tangent constraint and we'll need that tangent constraint to make this line a tangent to this circle i'm just going to use the point on object constraint there just click the mouse button that's connected i'll show you how the tangent changes so if i move this by dragging the mouse up and down you can see that moving around that object because we've got object online or object on point constraint there if i click that line and click this circle and then come up and use the tangent constraint you can see how that's been laid upon there now it's actually tangent to here so this line is touching that if i take that tangency constraint away if i hover over that android constraint click it and if we look over the left hand side here you can see it's been selected here click off click it and that's the point online constraint there if i click on the tangency we can see the tangency one has been selected as well hit the delete key that removes it and we can use the point and this circle and use a tangency there and we get the same effect so you can see how line on the point constraint has been removed and been replaced with a tangency that's the redundant constraints option to come up and look at here this auto remove redundance that's been removed from there and if we come down you can see we've got the tangency constraint there and the other one's been removed and we'll do the same on the other side so we're going to create a line connecting up so line from this point to here all the constraints have appeared hit escape click on this point click on this arc or this circle and use the tangency you can see those constraints have been removed and that's fully constrained there we also need to do the same here so come in click this line this time and this arc and use the tangency there and it's saying end point to end point and you see was applied and the constraint deleted and you can see we've got some problems it has gone orange that means we've got a problem with our constraints if we move out to the top it says please remove at least one constraint so i'm going to come down and remove that last constraint because obviously there's something wrong there hit delete let's have a look what we've got here so we've got this point let's connect to this line i want this line tangent with here and if we look to the left hand side we've got this line that goes up so i'm going to click that and hit delete because obviously when we add the tangent constraint these two lines it will move this line over so we don't need this line constraint this vertical constraint in here now we've removed that vertical constraint that can move so we want to make it something like this this tangency like this let's bring this back so this line and this arc make those tangent and we can see the constraint subtraction has been applied so we've got a tangency constraint now in here and the same from this side so let's get rid of this this vertical constraint here hit delete click this arc and this line and create a tangency between them and we can see it's been deleted so the point in that exercise is that you'll get to the point where you're adding constraints in which are the wrong constraints so just adding a new constraint will create some problems with that old constraint so we may have to delete that constraint which we originally added if our sketch becomes orange but we need to have a look at what's going on if we have vertical constraints going up here or even horizontal constraints then we must have a look if we're creating something tangent then it's going to go beyond the vertical constraint and we need to remove that vertical strength for the tangency to take now we have those constraints in there we need to mirror this over the other side if we look what's happening at the moment this sketch will break because we've got these lines in here and we've got this point over here which is not connected to our sketch at all so we're looking at making the base of the object if we take this part here just think forget about this circle in the middle here if we take this part here we've got this which is our hole and this piece here which will be extruded out so anything inside here will be a hole what we got to do is remove this arc from here and to do that we use a trim to trim an edge come in and click on this edge here that will trim this part out now so now we've got this part here and this part if this is extruded we'll just get this teardrop shape and this hole in here but we'll have problems over this side because this is not attached to the sketch so we need to mirror what we've done here over to this side i'm going to get the mouse pointer back because we're still in trim mode hit escape and i'm going to click these edges i'm just highlighting those edges by clicking on them and selecting all three so you can see they're a different color there's slightly different green too this side here i'm now going to sled and this is the last selection this line here and this will mirror this over to the other side so this saves us some time rather than recreating the same sketch on the right hand side we've got this mirror feature here creates a symmetry geometry with respect to the last selected line or point so our last selected line was this or we can come out to sketch sketch tools and symmetry and you can see how that's made the symmetry sketch over here and again we've got problems because this is not actually connected but our tangency has come through i'm going to hit control and set just to undo that last move so i need to make this point and this curve tangent you see what a tangent constraint on here the same on this side this this point and this curve fantasy i'm now going to remove this arc with the trim like so you can see we still have some problems on here and hit escape to get the mouse pointer back and i'm just going to move this this is the same in every single cab program you can move this it's a common practice with cad engineers which just moves to see what's going on why it's not constrained it controls that to bring it back and we can see that if we move it this point here is not coincident to this point so let me select those two use constant constraint the green is all that's been constrained and these have not been so you can see that hasn't been constrained there it controls that and we can put some constraints in here so for instance this goes this way so we can see we've got a point problem with point online constraint here it's not tangent to here so this point and this arc needs to be tangent therefore we get our fully constrained sketch so we can see the symmetry we've got so we take this line this is our line of symmetry we've got a hole 30 millimeters and we've got all these constrained correctly around here so we've got tangent at the top we've got to see the tangency tangency tendency so we've got symmetry line symmetry line and reflected both sides the part are is symmetrical now i've done that if i hit close and we can add a pad on here at the moment it's padding up 10 millimeters like so there is another circle i can add to here which is this inner circle but we're going to do that in a second to show you how the parametric works so we're going to pad this up around about 10 millimeters which is fine so we can change this length for so desire if we want to put 20 in here we can like so and actually i think i can go for that 20 millimeters hit okay and you can see on the left hand side we've got the body we've got the pad and there's a little green icon showing the last action so this pad was the last action we can open this up and see our sketch in here at the moment it's greyed out but if we press spacebar that brings the sketch back on the bottom we can see that green line on the bottom of that sketch if i click on the sketch and come down to the view and just bring this down i'm just going to increase that line width so we can see what's happening so i can press in the up arrow that increases that line width around that sketch it makes it a little bit more clearer to see see i'm white going around there do that with the points as well the vertices we can increase that size just makes you work a lot easier to deal with so i'm happy with that but i'm missing a part i'm missing a circle in here so we can come into this sketch and add this circle so i'm going to use a circle okay and this circle can be connected up all to constraints bring this out and hit escape to get the mouse pointer back or right mouse button click on that circle and we'll add our radius in there of 15 millimeters and okay that's all fully constrained close that now you can see how that parametric ability has taken effect we've edited the sketch and that's changed this pad i can click on that sketch now and press spacebar and we've got our first part of the part and now we're going to move on to the outer ring which i want to extrude from this and for that we need to place a sketch upon here upon this face so this is the face this is a face this is the face and you can see down the bottom left we've got the unknown body because it's not saved dot body dot pad dot face to face three face four i'm just going to save this now file save and it asks us where we want to put it so i'm just going to put this as free cad sketch lesson one you can give it a more minimum full name and you can see the document has changed name now so if i hover over this you can see it's still saying pre-selected unnamed body that will change when you next open the document so if i go file close all and then file come down to our recent files you see the sketch lesson one in there or we can open it if we so desire file open and we can go and search it on our file system if you hover over those now you can see it's saying pre-selected free cad sketch lesson one so we've changed that name it's only updated when we actually reload that part in there so now we need to hover over this face and add a sketch to this face so the part design is sketches upon faces and we're creating those parts extruding and pocketing out as i said before select the face and then come up to the sketch icon here or we can come out to sketch create sketch that will attach that sketch to that face so come over to model we can see a new sketch has been created here click on it click on the data tab this map mode says flat face it's been added to the face and it says what support is on its pad face 13 so we'll see that when we come back in let's go back to task so we're in the sketch mode at the moment and we're looking at this sketch we can constrain another circle to that center point here and bring this out like so what we're going to do is click now hit escape to get the mouse pointer back and click on that circle you can see it's there and it's sitting on that face and we're going to constrain that circle and we're going to set this to a radius constraint 75 millimeters and that places that circle there it can you can see it's actually partly off that sketch it can be off that sketch so if i set this to something else let's set this to say a hundred millimeters that means that is off that sketch that's still valid we can still pad up from this or pocket from this so i'm going to go for 80 millimeters and go from there so we can prove that so that's 80 millimeters there but we still have a problem because we're going to actually pad this up to make the extrusion of this part but we need an inner circle to follow this hole so to do that we're i'm going to import this geometry here we know the hole has a radius of 50 millimeters so we can create another circle or to constrain it to the center and bring it out and set the radius to 50 millimeters we could also import path this sketch so this edge here well the same part of the sketch is actually part of the model so we can use the create an edge link to external geometry and click on that and we can hover over these parts and actually click them and bring them in so i've actually bought that edge and that's linked to that external geometry now so i can click on this circle here and that external geometry and use the equality constraint and that makes those equal to each other so we've got an equals between the radius for the stoma geometry and the radius of our new sketch in there that hole let's close that and that's extrude that out so we're going to use the pad in part design it's called pad in particle destruction so just hit pad and we're going to set this something like 50 millimeters like so hit okay and that's our part done remember that we've actually pushed this over here which we can come in so if i bring this around let's have a look look over the left hand side here we've got this pad as our last action if i click on that for a space bar that will disappear but we can bring back our other pad so we can look back at what we've done but this is our last action we can see a little icon there showing last action that little down arrow so i'm just going to press the spacebar on that and that'll bring that back into resistance and the other pad has vanished click on the tree view so expand that out we can see our sketch in here double click that that's the sketch we used i'm going to change the radius of this back to 75. let's close that see what happens you can see how sketch has changed that is fully parametric so any changes made will affect that part remember to save control s and congratulations you've just created your first part in free cad and now we can move on so we'll just complete video 1.1 and we're going to move on to 1.2 so in our next video we're gonna be introducing the pocket so we've worked with pads now we're gonna introduce a pocket we're gonna be using the same model over in video 1.2 and we're going to be modifying the sketch and introducing that pocket in there what's going to happen is we're going to end up with two very similar models or two very similar parts and we're going to compare those and we're going to see the differences then we're going to use something called refine on both of them we will then compare them after the refine and we'll see that they're both exactly the same so i hope you enjoyed this lesson and i hope to see you in the next video if you like what 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Channel: MangoJelly Solutions

Views: 3,086

Keywords: CAD, three, 3D, CNC, Printing, solidworks, autoCAD, freecad 0.19, freecad 19, freecad basics, basic course, fundamentals, learn freecad, freecad beginners

Id: DcNlm8JAfJc

Length: 35min 8sec (2108 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 20 2021