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With the Ver­sion 1.0 release can­di­dates com­ing thick and fast it’s a good time to explore some of the new fea­tures that Ver­sion 1.0 will have to offer. One of the most eager­ly antic­i­pat­ed new fea­tures is the Assem­bly work­bench. Doc­u­men­ta­tion and a great tuto­r­i­al can be found for the Assem­bly work­bench here but it can be fun to just quick­ly work through the most min­i­mal viable exam­ple to get a quick idea of a basic workflow.

In our tuto­ri­als we always refer to tools by the name of the tool that appears in the tool tip when you roll over the tool icons. Rolling over tool icons and read­ing tool tips is a great way to learn what func­tion­al­i­ty a work­bench offers.

In this exam­ple we first used the part work­bench to cre­ate two parts in the same project. Both are 20mm x 10mm x 5mm cubes, one is a union with a cylin­der and the oth­er is a cut with a cylin­der removed. We right clicked and used the “ran­dom colour” option to set each object to a dif­fer­ent colour and placed the objects next to each oth­er not overlapping.

Mov­ing to the Assem­bly work­bench we first click the Cre­ate Assem­bly tool icon. This cre­ates an Assem­bly object in the file tree with Ori­gin and Joints labels cre­at­ed inside it. Next left click each part we made in turn and drag them on top of the Assem­bly object in the file tree. This should move the parts inside the Assem­bly object and so can be includ­ed in the assembly.

Next select our part that is the union object with the pro­trud­ing cylin­der (the green object in our exam­ple) and then click the Tog­gle Ground­ed tool icon. In the pre­view you should now see that this part has a red lock sym­bol placed over it and it means that it is locked in it’s cur­rent posi­tion and can­not be moved or rotated.

We want to assem­ble the oth­er part so that the hole is cen­tred and con­strained around the small cylinder/axle. To do this, in the pre­view win­dow click to select the upper edge of the hole and then use the con­trol key to also select the upper face of the cylinder.

With these select­ed we sim­ple click the Cre­ate Rev­o­lute Joint tool icon and then click OK. You should now see that our sim­ple assem­bly is com­plete and if you left click on the non ground­ed block you can rotate it freely around the cylin­dri­cal axle object but not move it away from that connection.

This is a super sim­ple way to dip a toe into this work­bench. If you want to explore a lit­tle fur­ther the exam­ple in the doc­u­men­ta­tion linked above is well worth work­ing through to intro­duce you to dif­fer­ent types of motion and joints. We look for­ward to see­ing what the com­mu­ni­ty makes!