SolidWorks basic commands (part 1)

First of all excuse me for my bad English, I'm from Croatia :). Ok, this is my first post and I decided to do a little tutorial on basic commands in SolidWorks. So i took my Engineering manual ( "Strojarski priručnik" by Bojan Kraut - it is like a Bible for mechanical engineers in Balkan countries) and I found an steel I profile table:

I took the profile with the mark 20 (marked in the photo above).

So to get started you open SolidWorks and in the left upper corner you go to File/New, and then you press Part and OK. Now on the left side you pick your plain in which you will sketch your model (I picked the front plane). Now you use the basic commands to shetch a shape like in the picture below (using the measurements from the table above), so you get something like this:



In this firs step you use basic sketch commands (Line, Centerline, Sketch Fillet and Smart Dimensions).
The next step is very simple, you use the Mirror Entities command. On the left side Mirror command window appears, and in the first field (Entities to mirror) you mark all the lines except the centerlines, and in the second field (Mirror about) you mark the vertical centerline (The Copy option must be checked). Now you get the cross section of the profile:



Now we have a 2D sketch, we now want to make a 3D model and we will accomplish this with the Extrude Boss/Base command. In this first tutorial we will just focus on the Depth field. The standard length in JUS standard for I profile (and other profiles and pipes too) is from 4 - 15 meters (in most cases the lengh of the profiles is 6 or 12 meters. So in the Depth field you enter 6000 mm (like in the picture below):



You pres OK and you get a 3D model of an I profile like this:



You have all sorts of profiles in the toolbox, but I took this profile to explain the basic commands.

You can also download this part on the link below:

http://www.filefactory.com/file/ce89157/n/I_profil.SLDPRT

Sponsored by toolshop Alatnica D-plast from Osijek. You can look up them on the folowing link:
www.d-plast.hr