I've got a part that's been used for 10 years and is in thousands of assemblies. I want to create an updated version of the part from scratch - it's similar but needs to be modeled differently than the original. I want to be able to use "Replace Components" in my assemblies - swap in the new part and keep the mates.
I understand that I can name the faces, and I've named the important ones identically in both the old and new part. However, the mates break when I use Replace Components. It seems like the mates maintain a reference to the old face name / ID despite my having renamed the faces.
Example files are attached. Replace component 'old socket' with 'new socket' - even though the mated faces are named the same, the mates break.
If for example I mate 'old socket' AFTER I've named the faces, and then Replace Component, the mates work. Could somebody confirm this, and is this expected behavior?
Before you could rename a face (back in 2011/2012 maybe?) I had come across a way to get the internal name that SolidWorks assigned to the face. I believe that somebody even created a macro to change that name. If I could get the internal face names, maybe I could use those names in the new part and the mates would work? Is there a way to get the internal name? Using "Face Properties" just gives a blank.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks,
Brian
Brian,, I tried all sorts of things on this, but only by deleting the mates in the assembly and re-mating, then replacing the "OLD" with the "NEW" could I get the "Replace Components" to work properly (all mates solved). Then I could replace old with new and vice versa. To me this would indicate that the face names are not the issue. Tried re-ordering mates, deleting them then undoing but couldn't get it to work properly. I'm wondering, that if the mates were originally placed in an earlier version, maybe they will not replace properly in a newer version. Just a thought. Seems like I have heard of similar issues.
I know this does not solve your problem with thousands of assemblies over a ten year period but perhaps it will get greater minds than mine to work on it.