My company is transitioning from Creo to SW and I've begun using SW for some new projects.  I have 3 years of SW experience from the early 2000s but the bulk of my experience (18 years) is in Creo.

I saw a tutorial on the advanced mates available in SW and was very excited.  many of them would be very useful in the projects I work on.  But, I tried to do some simple things and they wouldn't work.  after investigating, I started to wonder whether they would work with drafted surfaces.

99% of the parts I work with are plastic and thus they all have drafted surfaces. I made a simple pin and a slot without draft and got it to mate just fine.  but, as soon as I added draft to the slot the mate failed.  when I went to redefine it, I was unable to pick one of the drafted slot surfaces as an assembly mate.  is this correct?  will I be unable to use some or all of the advanced mates when surfaces are drafted?  in the context of a slot, I think I could define a sketch as a path, place a vertex on my pin, and work around it that way but it's certainly not as straight forward as just picking slot and your surfaces.

my company does a lot of gears and gear trains as well so I'm wondering how well the mechanical mates may work since all of those parts also have drafted surfaces.

thanks for the feedback

Michael