Hello all,

I ran into a few problems really concerning animation and mates in SW.

First, I am trying to do very simple motions, nothing complex, but apparently, SW doesn't like simplicity haha. In the model I provided, I am trying to animate a path for the actuator (Pathmate1), angle placement of the spout 15 degrees in both directions and back to neutral (Angle14) and distance of the clevis arm from 7.5in to 15.5in and back (Distance16). I don't think that's anything complex. My goal was to avoid animation (an annoying process) so I can opt for the more simple "mate controller" then save as a video file but that didn't work.

Attempts:

1. I tried cam and slot mates but the former wouldn't allow me to select multiple faces and can't be used with mate controller (ideal scenario, slot mates with mate controller). The latter, although it can be used with mate controller, doesn't allow me to select the faces of the slot (this one really grinded my gears!). I ended up using a "cross" path for the path mate for the actuator to move in the cross slot, so I made the current sketch so SW can treat it as one path. I tried using mate controller but for some reason, when I add position 2 and change the "percent along path" constraint and playback, it didn't change! This also happened when I also attempted to use the mate controller with Distance16 and Angle14, NO CHANGE!

2. For the angle of the spout, which I THOUGHT would be pretty easy, it wasn't. As stated above, mate controller didn't work for the angle. So with animation, I added a keyframe to change the angle mate to 15deg and it worked. Now I wanted to change it to be at 15 degree in the other direction, so I put 345deg (no negatives in SW), but it spun around too much and interfered with the other parts (you can try it for yourself). Basically, I can't get it to animate from 15deg one way to 0 deg then 15 deg the other way! Yes, I tried manually moving it, but I got red (bad) keyframes.

Request:

Please I need to know what's wrong with my mate controller feature and how to get the angle motion correctly using keyframes in animation.

PS: In the assembly, Motions 1 and 2 in the tab at the bottom don't have the animation. I removed what I had animated.