Showing two positions of a cylinder? New to Pro-E

We do this with nitrogen spring cylinders by modelling the body and piston in the compressed positions, and add a revolved surface about the bore axis to show the extended position. You can drive the surface top from a variable that dimensions the top top bottom of the cylinder. In this way we have a visual of the stroke of the cylinder, and because the extended top is only a surface, it doesnt interfere with global interference checks.

Not sure exactly what you want to do or show, but I'd try using a family table. Create an instance for the 2nd position. That way the BOM won't count

2 of the same parts. Separate views for each position should work fine. If you're trying to show both positions in one view... not sure. I'd have to try it out.

Couple more possibilites:

1. Create an explode state: these can be shown in drawings as a view state. The explode state would capture the extended cylinder position. No additional models needed. It is just another view of your original assembly.
2. Assemble your model with "connections", not 6dof fixed (the usual condition of an assembled component). A "pin" connection allows planar movement of piston along axis of cylinder/shaft. Once constrained in this way, you can take snapshots that can be made available to drawing views.

These may require additional modules of Pro/e; depends what you got already. If details needed, they can be provided.

Yet another: drive the piston with a dimension controlled by a family table.

Sure could. Mechanism Design Extension does offer some really nice functionality for simulating a cylinder's motion. In fact, there's actually a Connection constraint called Cylinder. This allows both translation and rotation about the cylinder's centerline axis. A Slider connection only allows translation along the cylinder's centerline axis. Slider works just fine if you don't need any rotation. And it can be sort of fun to animate these types of mechanisms using Pro/E's Animation module.

Ron M.

And we didn't even get into the functionality of design animation ('Applications>Design Animation') which combines some of the functionality of mechanism design with that of creating exploded views. All of which can be captured in snapshots and mpegs. What is that ~ five different approaches!?! The biggest problem in moving from SolidWorks to Pro/e may be focusing on JUST one. It was no problem with SW; there was only one.

Thanks for the options. I will have to give some of those a shot and let you know how it worked out.