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proper way to mirror an assy

bob z. needs a little advice. bob z. has a friend. you see, his friend has this problem. no, no, it's not bob z. it's his friend. his friend was wondering if you have this sore hand and your vision is going... :~)>

back to the real issue. what is the best way to mirror an assy that has the following specs: Total number of components: 160 Parts: 140 Unique parts: 33 Sub-assemblies 20 Unique sub-assemblies 9

as you can see, this ass'y isn't terribly large. how would you guys (and/or gals) go about making a complete mirror of this? bob z. has to do this quite often and it just never turns out real well.

thanks in advance. you guys rock.

Reply to
bob zee
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Bob,

Is it possible to pattern it instead of mirroring it? Sometimes I can get away with a 180 deg circular pattern - the advantage is that I don't have to re-create the mates.

If you really have to create a mirrored assembly (complete with mirrored parts no doubt) then I hope you have better luck than I normally do.

Merry :-)

Reply to
Merry Owen

a macro can do it.

1) mirror all parts and place/orient them at their symmetric position ("easy" for XY, XZ or YZ sym. plane ) 2) re-create all mates... ("hard" : is it really needed ?) I'd say 1 to 3 days work... how much would bob.z's friend pay ?
Reply to
Philippe Guglielmetti

what is the going rate? bob z. currently does a combination of items 1 and

  1. not very 'user-friendly'.
Reply to
bob zee

I do a mirror of sheet metal parts and the mirror does not work at all. the orientation of the individual parts in the assembly end up looking like someone threw them past the mirror plane like so many dice...

Ben

Reply to
Ben

that is exactly what bob z. is seein' right now... hmm...

Reply to
bob zee

Bob....(or his friend)+

If You don't need to mirror parts......just do a 180° cirkular pattern instead ....works terrible well most of the time....otherwise I suffer with You ... to mirror an assy is not one of the strongest features in SW

Krister

bob zee skrev i diskussionsgruppsmeddelandet:bf13mc$9raa0$ snipped-for-privacy@ID-177997.news.uni-berlin.de...

Reply to
Krister L

Bob Are you ticking the box that says "L and R hand versions" (something like this - SW is on the other machine so can't check exact wording)? I get the random parts generator effect otherwise... Also, do you find the parts just not mirroring at all (mirror part created, but empty?) I sometimes get this and only solution I have found is to save and close the assembly, close Solidworks, restart SW, open assembly and carry out mirror and it seems to work first go..... I guess another SW "charming period feature" (to quote a property salesman!)

Reply to
Deri Jones

A pet peeve of mine for years. They dangle a potentially great process in front of us, but never get it working. Subassemblies rarely work with mates enabled. Parts fly everywhere.

You can sometimes get things to hang together without mates and then edit the mirrored sub, and fix all the components. The mirrored sub won't update when you later change the original, but then it wouldn't have with mates either.

A functional mirror copy would be an extremely valuable feature for me ... more valuable than all the new features combined from the last several major releases. But I suspect that they (swx) are simply stumped on getting it to work, and they have given up. You never hear a peep out of them on the subject.

But we have lots of great graphical screen gimmicks :)

venting disengaged .... bill

diskussionsgruppsmeddelandet:bf13mc$9raa0$ snipped-for-privacy@ID-177997.news.uni-berlin.de...

Reply to
bill allemann

yes, i believe this would be incredibly useful! oops, bob z. said 'i' again. oh well... :~)>

oh yeah, question #2 - mirrored assy's do indeed explode. really makes quite a mess!

Reply to
bob zee

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