Discover how to model complex structural plates using reference lines, guides, and the circle tool. The article provides a step-by-step process, covering everything from drawing lines and circles to creating bolt openings and grouping components.
Key Insights
- The article outlines how to model structural plates, starting from an unknown angle. It suggests drawing reference lines using available structural truss drawings and using these as a guide to model the plates.
- Guidelines are also utilised to mark the center lines of bolt openings. Using the circle tool, these openings can be drawn, selected, and then deleted to create the bolt holes in the structural plates.
- After creating each component, the section, or plate, is grouped together. This process is repeated for each structural plate, ensuring accurate dimensioning and placement of bolt holes.
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So in this video, we are going to continue to model the rest of our structural plates. So again, let's go back to this point here.
We do not know what this angle is, so let's draw some reference lines for where D is. Let's open up that PDF again of our structural truss drawings. We can see that D is right here.
If we go into this point here, we can actually draw some lines from here to here, here to here, and let's select those two and then move these two right here just so we have these as reference. And then let's do a guide off of this—one inch. We know there's a one-inch space between, and now we can draw a line from here perpendicular to this.
For some reason, we're not able to actually draw a perpendicular line off the grid line. We would have to draw this line first. We know we can see that as one foot 4.5 inches, and then from here, we can hover over this edge and then get that perpendicular to edge and type four, and then again hover this line.
You can hold down Shift to lock this thing and then use this point to constrain a line from point and then click. And now we have this plate, and then let's add some guidelines again for the centerlines of our bolt openings. We'll type two, and then again from this line here we'll do two, and then we'll do four, and then from here we'll do two. Then let's go to our Circle tool and draw those openings.
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0.5, snap to there, 0.5, and 0.5. Then we'll select this face, hold down Shift or hold down CTRL—either one works—and then delete. Then we'll double-click, right-click, Make Group. Then we'll go into our bolt head component and select this intersection, this intersection, and this intersection. Then we'll do a selection window, right-click, Make Group. Double-click into this group, and let's delete this line and this line. Now we'll go to Edit > Delete Guides. All right, D is complete. Now our final one is E. So again, we don't see any angle lines, so let's go bring in—we know that E is right here. We have these, so let's draw some lines again on top of this so we can copy these over. We want to get all of the primary angles and the spacings for each one of these, and then we can do a selection window, select all those lines, and then we'll do a Move and move this over to right where they're just about on each one of those. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect—just close enough. And we'll make a group of all those reference lines so we can delete those all at once later. Selection window, right-click, Make Group. And now let's draw some guidelines—one inch off of each of these.
Now let's go to our Line tool and let's see where we want to start. We know what these intersection points are, which is great. But if we start from here, we don't have a dimension of what this is. However, from here we can see that this dimension is one foot. We'll go down here along the green, we'll type one foot. Then across here, we'll go to four, and then up to the intersection point. Then we'll hit Escape to cancel this because we don't know what this dimension is. We'll go from this point, from here, and we'll type in one foot. Then hover over this edge, we'll go to here, we'll go to four inches, and then here. Then finally at this point, we know that this whole total dimension is two feet, but we don't know what this dimension here is or this dimension. So what we'll do is draw this line here, and along here, we'll type in—we'll look at our length—and we'll type 8.5 inches, and then we'll go up along the magenta and type four, and then here we'll type two feet, and then on the magenta, type four, and here. Again, we'll do some guidelines for our bolt openings—two and four, and then two and four. Then we'll do our centerlines—two and two. You can see that this gets very busy with a lot of lines, but it's best to know where these are at. We'll do our circle again, and we'll go from this point, go to 0.5,0.5 or one-half. Again, you can go pretty quick as we can see that it's been snapping to each one of those. Now let's go to select each one of these, holding down the CTRL key (for the plus) to select each of these faces, then delete. Then we'll hit the Delete key, double-click, right-click, Make Group. Now we'll go to our bolt head and go again—each time hitting the bolt head component, we'll rejoin these intersections. Okay, and then I'll go to Edit > Delete Guides. Do a selection window, right-click, Make Group, and we can delete those lines. All right, now we're at our final piece here. Again, we see that we have dimensions. You can see that there's 63 over here, meaning that it's going to be 63 over in this direction as well. So what we can do is start from this corner right here, and we'll go up one foot. Then we'll go to our Protractor tool and draw a reference angle at 63 degrees. Again, we'll go from here—the bottom—now we'll go across to four inches. So what I'm doing is, I don't know what this dimension is right here, right? We don't have a dimension. However, we do have a dimension from this top point. So what I can do is do a guideline from here to here to get four inches. Now we have a point here, and now let's do a guideline from here to get to the center point. We know that this depth is four inches of these plates, so we'll type two, and now we have this intersection line that we can draw—line measuring at one foot one inch. Then along the magenta, we'll type four. Now we can go back to here. We can do the same thing from here. However, we need to go, and then we can go from this point. Now we can infer this direction, this point right here—we know that's one foot. Then let's do Protractor tool to get this dimension, to get this angle to be 63 degrees. Then we'll offset this dimension with the Tape Measure tool—again, we're using the same tools we've been using, just different ways to kind of figure it out. As you start modeling and developing, you'll create your own methods and ways to do these things as quickly and efficiently as possible. Now that we made this plate, let's again draw some other guidelines for the centerline of these bolts—two. Then we got these final dimensions—two and four, two and four, and finally this last—two and four. All right, we'll go to our Circle tool again and we'll draw these at 0.5 inches or one-half. It'll automatically snap, so we can go fairly quickly through each of these, zooming in until we get to the right intersection point right here, and then try to get to that snap of one-half. There we go. Now I'll select each of these faces for these bolt holes, holding down the CTRL key, and then delete. We'll double-click this plate, right-click, Make Group. Then we'll go to our bolt heads again, placing these right there in our intersection point. Zoom in if necessary—if there are multiple lines, make sure that you're snapping to the correct intersection. All right, I'm going to go to Edit > Delete Guides, and let's do a selection window of this and right-click, Make Group.
