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Assembly for modeling a popsicle bridge?
doug_smith714
Member Posts: 6 ✭
I'm an old Solidworks user and have recently learned about Onshape. I'm using it a bit with my physics students in high school.
I wanted to model a popsicle bridge in Onshape. It's not clear to me if I should be modeling all of the sticks and putting them together in the part studio or as an assembly. I guess I'm not clear on what is the delineation between part studio and assemblies.
If you could advise on what my path forward should be, I would appreciate it. Maybe you have some tips on putting together something like a popsicle stick bridge in terms of fast ways to copy parts and set them in place.
thanks
I wanted to model a popsicle bridge in Onshape. It's not clear to me if I should be modeling all of the sticks and putting them together in the part studio or as an assembly. I guess I'm not clear on what is the delineation between part studio and assemblies.
If you could advise on what my path forward should be, I would appreciate it. Maybe you have some tips on putting together something like a popsicle stick bridge in terms of fast ways to copy parts and set them in place.
thanks
0
Best Answer
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Jake_Rosenfeld
Moderator, Onshape Employees, Developers Posts: 1,646 
Hi Doug,
Unless you will be breaking apart the popsicle sticks into different shapes, it sounds like you could just model one stick in a part studio and then assemble a bunch of those sticks together in an assembly. I've made a (very unsturdy) example of how you could do this here:
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/746cfbaa8b78ad55b259573d/w/601028d2066b82465581add3/e/acf72321f78eb71d2b9a08c7
Basically I made one model of a popsicle stick, then inserted 4 of them into an assembly to lay them 4 across for the bridge itself, then inserted that as a subassembly (making sure to group as I brought them in) to make the bridge itself.
The key here is that you have one identical part (a popsicle stick) repeated many times. It would be quite a pain to copy/transform a bunch of these in one Part studio but pretty easy to insert a bunch of them into an assembly with the 'insert' dialog and assemble them with different mates (I figure you'll only need the fasten mates, as it's pretty hard to have moving parts in a popsicle stick assembly).Jake Rosenfeld - Modeling Team7
Answers
Unless you will be breaking apart the popsicle sticks into different shapes, it sounds like you could just model one stick in a part studio and then assemble a bunch of those sticks together in an assembly. I've made a (very unsturdy) example of how you could do this here:
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/746cfbaa8b78ad55b259573d/w/601028d2066b82465581add3/e/acf72321f78eb71d2b9a08c7
Basically I made one model of a popsicle stick, then inserted 4 of them into an assembly to lay them 4 across for the bridge itself, then inserted that as a subassembly (making sure to group as I brought them in) to make the bridge itself.
The key here is that you have one identical part (a popsicle stick) repeated many times. It would be quite a pain to copy/transform a bunch of these in one Part studio but pretty easy to insert a bunch of them into an assembly with the 'insert' dialog and assemble them with different mates (I figure you'll only need the fasten mates, as it's pretty hard to have moving parts in a popsicle stick assembly).