Rabbit hutch weldment

My daughter tricked me into buying her a rabbit for 4-H. (It is a long story; I am too embarrassed to tell.)

I had no hutch, so I did what any engineer would do, I went on-line to see if there were any designs I could download. I found a few designs, but they were not in my budget range. (i.e. none free)

As with any do-it-your-self project I undertake there were casualties:

So why is this in a SOLIDWORKS blog?

• I designed the hutch in SOLIDWORKS, it has two interesting features that I wanted to show you:
  1. Note that I designed the hutch using the poorly named SOLIDWORKS weldment feature. A weldment for something made out of wood? Sure! The weldment feature is a great tool to use any time you have multiple length parts sharing a common cross section. You don’t have to come up with a zillion configurations or part files. Plus you get cut lists – I was able to whittle my $100 worth of lumber to a small pile pretty quickly.
  2. Most weldments utilize a 3D sketch. I don’t care how good you are with 3D sketches, it is far easier to work with solids. Notice I started with a solid, then created a 3D sketch, then related my sketch entities to the solid? Now I can quickly change the interior volume of the hutch by changing my solid’s size. As nice as this example is, complex weldments [3D sketches] with bent pieces get an even faster payoff.
• I will be building a window seat sometime soon, hopefully someone will design one in SOLIDWORKS and pass it on to me.

SOLIDWORKS file.