I have sat down with a coffee and a quiet smoke, before I come to write this. Why? To calm myself down and write sensibly without going mad with anger! :-O
There is Still a very serious flaw in SW mates, that I thought had be rectified, until this afternoon that was. I was in a happy mood, and adding some sub- assemblies to a main assembly, whilst doing my very bad impression of Elton John.
Then BANG the whole assembly fell to pieces, with red and yellow mate error messages popping up under EVERY sub- assembly and in the main assembly! ooer! :-S
When I say fell apart, I mean just that, with bit and pieces all over the place and some sub-assemblies greyed out
No problem, just delete the last mate........ no that did not work.. mmmm Even more mate errors came popping up..... ok stay calm......there must be something I did wrong. |-)
Now just an hour before, I had found the references and copied these to cdr, (I back up to cdr, at the end of the morning and at the end of the day), pass experience taught me that.
The other thing I do, is to put each sub-assembly to main assembly, mates, into a separate folder for each sub-assembly.
So booting up another pc, next to mine, I loaded up the backup copies and looked at each sub-assembly in turn to see if there was any difference.
HA!, there was, one sub-assembly has a sheet metal part in it, a drip tray, which WAS coincident mated in the main assembly, to a frame made from ERW box section.
In the sub-assembly on the latest main assembly, this had CHANGED to a tangent mate! Opening the sub-assembly, showed me, that the mate had changed to a tangent mate.
Unable to change the type of mate in the current assembly or sub-assembly, (everything was greyed out), I deleted the tangent mate and re-established the old coincident mate. When I rebuilt the main assembly, ALL of the errors disappeared, and the assembly went back to how it was, with all of the pieces re-establishing their old mates
Now here are the questions,
1, why did this happen? 2, why was it allowed to happen, (with no error message, stating over constrained, like normal). 3, And finally, why was a coincident mate CHANGED to a tangent mate?Phew!, now where has that Elton John CD gone?, la la la le la :-))))