Hello all. I am trying to build an assembly and setting by mates. I have set some limits as to where certian linkages allow a specified amount of movement in degrees. I have the mates set and working for a while and when I start grabbing parts to move the linkages, I will lose movement of the parts when I reach a limit. I cannot move them until I rebuild them and then all the mates poop out and scatter parts where they should not be. Any one have any suggestions?
Charles,
I wish I had some good suggestions, but I don't understand SolidWorks mates enough to tell you why they lock up or blow up. It does seem like the Advanced Mates are more problematic than the "old" mates, but even the simplest of mates can behave badly at times. Having overly contstrained parts where degrees of freedom are constrained by more than one mate, is probably bad. Trying to move your parts quickly can cause mates to fail, causing a tangent to flip to the opposite side, for example.
If you can live with it, you might want to fix as many parts as possible, rather than relying on the mates. Perhaps suppress the mates temporarily and fix the parts that don't move. That should reduce the amount of work that SolidWorks has to do. You can lock parts together that move, but not relative to one another, as well.
When things blow up, you may be better off to just shut it down and reload it.
Jerry Steiger
Try using a skeleton sketch or a layout to drive your assembly rather than mates.
I find it less likely to fall apart.
Jason.
Hello. Would you mind elaborating on this? I'm not quite sure what you mean.
Thanks!
Charlie
I'll try.
You can create a dummy part using the layout command, inside is a sketch that drives the assembly geometry. You'll want to create an axis on each sketch vertex
that will represent your pivot points.
Now assembly your parts to each axis and use the sketch to drive the geometry.
It will not be flexible in the sense you can drag the parts but you can get the motion by modifying your driving sketch.
If you have some models to post I could give it a go for you.
Hope this helps.
Jason.
Charles,
I wish I had some good suggestions, but I don't understand SolidWorks mates enough to tell you why they lock up or blow up. It does seem like the Advanced Mates are more problematic than the "old" mates, but even the simplest of mates can behave badly at times. Having overly contstrained parts where degrees of freedom are constrained by more than one mate, is probably bad. Trying to move your parts quickly can cause mates to fail, causing a tangent to flip to the opposite side, for example.
If you can live with it, you might want to fix as many parts as possible, rather than relying on the mates. Perhaps suppress the mates temporarily and fix the parts that don't move. That should reduce the amount of work that SolidWorks has to do. You can lock parts together that move, but not relative to one another, as well.
When things blow up, you may be better off to just shut it down and reload it.
Jerry Steiger