solidworks creating and dissolving sub-assemblies and...this now breaks the assembly down into its...

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Creating and Dissolving Sub-Assemblies

Creating and dissolving Sub-Assemblies During the modeling process, the opportunity comes along that allows us the chance to speed up the building of assemblies by making a selection of parts into a sub assembly. This can be a very quick and easy process that SOLIDWORKS has given us.


Creating a sub-assembly First you have a standard collection of parts built into a simple assembly. Over the course of building multiple assemblies of a similar style, you notice that the combination of the Bolt-1, Nut-1 and Washer-1 are always used in the same grouping


If you hold down the Shift key and select all three components and then right-click

You get the option of “Form New Subassembly”.


Usually when this is performed you will get the warning that some of the mates are now redundant and will need to be cleaned up.

Clean up the offending mate(s) one at a time until all warnings are gone. Once this is taken care of you now have a sub-assembly built within the assembly that consists of the three selected components.

One thing to note is that while the sub assembly is created, it is not yet named or saved to be used as an assembly outside of this assembly that it was created in.


To do this, right-mouse click on the newly created assembly and select: “Save Assembly (in External File)”

This brings up the dialog box to allow specifying both name and location of the newly created sub-assembly.


Slow double click on the “File Name” to rename

Click on the “Specify Path” radio button to locate where you want the new assembly to be saved.

The new assembly is now available to be loaded into any other assembly as a component.


Dissolving a SubAssembly Sometime later in time in a differernt assembly that you have inserted your sub assembly into, you realize that you need to change out one of the components in this assembly. Changing a component in the assembly you created previously would, however, make the change everywhere that this asssembly is used. You don’t want to do that. The option now is for you to dissolve this sub assembly in the current assembly and replace the components as needed or desired. This is a very simple, one step process. Right mouse click on the sub assembly and select “Dissolve Subassembly”


This now breaks the assembly down into its individual components and the files can now be dealt with as individual entities.

I hope this demonstration of how to create and dissolve sub-assemblies was helpful.

solidworks creating and dissolving sub-assemblies and...this now breaks the assembly down into its...

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