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Help on flexible mates?

I've never used flexible mates much and was wondering if there is some tutorial help somewhere on the subject. There doesn't seem to be anything in the online tutorial and the help file is very brief. When I put a subassembly into a higher assembly, things don't work. An example is a common machine slide assembly (Slide.Sldasm). Carriage.Sldasm has the usual mates to keep it running on the ways of Base.Sldasm and maybe a limit mate for the x travel. I put Slide.Sldasm into a higher level assembly, e.g. Machine.Sldasm, and then in FM->Component Properties for Slide.Sldasm, I check Solve as Flexible. I then constrain Tool.Sldprt to a face within Carriage.Sldasm. I can use the mouse and the grab tool (Move Component) and the combination of Carriage.Sldasm and Tool.Sldprt will move within the X travel limits. While this looks cool, it serves no purpose. If I try to put a mate on Tool.Sldprt to locate it relative to anything within Machine.Sldasm (and pull Carriage.Sldprt along with it), I get overdefined errors all over the place and nothing moves. In a new swx release, I often don't have time to research whether a new feature actually works, so I'll continue to use an old method, and I think I have for 2 or 3 releases in this case. I certainly hope I have missed something.

Thanks, Bill

Reply to
bill allemann
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forgot to mention: sw2006sp4

Reply to
bill allemann

This should have been posted as a followup (reply) in the thread you started titled "Help on flexible mates?".

Apparently you're new to the Usenet. This will help get you started;

The Usenet Newbie Project

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Reply to
Black Dragon

Bill,

Unless something has change between 2004 and 2006 you can use only one instance of a flexible subassembly (configuration name Slide A) in a higher level assembly. If you need multiple instances of the same slide subassembly within the parent assembly then you need to make a configuration for each occurrence (example: configurations Slide A1, Slide A2 etc..).

Or You made Slide.sldasm flexible, sounds like you also need to make carriage and base.sldasm flexible as well. I am not clear as to which assembly tool.sldprt belongs.

Kman

Reply to
Kman

Kman, I didn't follow what you meant about multiple configs of the slide. There is only one. Tool.sldprt is a top level component to be used for driving the motion of Carriage.sldasm. There is no option for "Solve as Flexible" on Carriage.sldasm, only on Slide.sldasm

The feature mgr would look something like this:

Machine.sldasm (top level) | |----Slide.sldasm ("Solve as Flex" chkd) | | | |----Base.sldasm (Static) | | | |----Carriage.sldasm (2B movable) | | |----Tool.Sldprt (mate for this moves carriage?)

Hopefully, word wrapping doesn't mess this up...

thanks, bill

Reply to
bill allemann

Kman,

You no longer have to create multiple configs of a subassembly in order to make multiple instances of that subassembly flexible at the top level assembly. (One thing that still gets on my nerves is you can't multiple select the instances and make them all flexible at once.)

I can't remember if this changed in 2005 or 2006. (I am guessing

2005.) It is a big timesaver and seemed to work very well the few times I have used it.

Best Regards,

Ricky Jordan CSWP Dynetics, Inc. Huntsville, AL

check out my blog at

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Kman wrote:

Reply to
Ricky Jordan

Nice!

Kman

Reply to
Kman

I was just experimenting with another sample assembly and found that the problem may be that the "movable" portion of Slide.sldasm is a subassembly (Carriage.Sldsasm). In another trial, the equivalent of Carriage.Sldasm was instead Carriage.Sldprt, and it worked OK.

Apparently there's some kind of issue with a subassy within a flexible assy. This was a vendor supplied assembly, so I'll have to see if I can recreate the problem with my own assemblies.

Bill

Reply to
bill allemann

What you are doing sounds like it should work to me. One thing that may cause the "over constrained problem" is the type of mate you are trying to apply at the top level.

e.g. if you are trying to apply a distance mate between faces of the Tool and Machine, it might think they are not perfectly parallel and fail (because of internal computational tolerances / rounding errors etc). An alternative would be to make the distance mate between the origin of the Tool and a face of the Machine that is normal to the direction of travel.

Worth a try.....

John H

Reply to
John H

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