Hi,

This is my first post here.  I'm having some trouble with a rack and pinion sub-assembly.  If I open the sub-assembly independently, everything works fine (all mates including the rack and pinion mate are satisfied and without reported errors).  If I insert the rack and pinion sub-assembly into a parent assembly (just a flat plate to mount the rack to), and leave the default solve type as rigid, there are no errors.  If I then change the solve type for the rack and pinion sub-assembly to flexible, numerous errors result, namely a lot of overdefined mate errors.

I've played around with this for a good bit, and the attached assembly file (the parent assembly is Dumb Test Asm.asm ... a little frustration may have went into the file naming) seems to be a well-reduced test case for the problem.  I first ran into the problem with a much larger assembly file with a lot more intermediate parts.  The product of that debugging was isolating which components/mates/relations were causing a whole bunch of errors.  Just the rack and pinion sub-assembly, inserted into the 2-component parent assembly, seems to be sufficient to recreate the problem I first experience in a larger model.

I'm working in SolidWorks 2011 x64 in case that is important.  The gear and rack files were made from the SolidWorks Toolbox.  I used Pack and Go, but I don't know if that's enough to get functional standalone models into the zip file.  If there are problems opening the assembly files in the attached zip, please let me know and I'll try and fix it if I can.

Any idea what be going on with respect to seeming to work without errors independently but not work as a flexible sub-assembly in a parent model?

Thanks,

Rob Grogan