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Frozen assembly components 2007

Frozen assembly components 2007

Frozen assembly components 2007

(OP)
I have an assembly I've been working on for animating over the last four days.  I've been steadily adding components, limiting their motion with mates, but allowing specific sorts of motion (for the animation).

I added a component to the assembly, added a coincident mate between faces, and suddenly it won't move at all--after a single coincident mate.

Not only that, but all the degrees of freedom given to the other parts and sub-assemblies in my assembly are also frozen.  Not by mates, but not able to be explained, either.  Looks like my assembly just turned into garbage.

Any ideas whether there's a toggle of some sort I may have hit that locks free motion?  One sub-assembly can still move in one axis.  Other than that, all else is clamped down.  When I insert any part at random and give it a single mate (coincident, parallel, whatever), the part freezes completely.

Bug?  I'd like to kill it. ..

Jeff Mowry
www.industrialdesignhaus.com
Reason trumps all.  And awe trumps reason.

RE: Frozen assembly components 2007

Try the simple things first; all sub assemblies rigid/flexible? Is there a limit to the number of permitted mates in an assy or have I just imagined that?

RE: Frozen assembly components 2007

A coworker of mine had a similar issue.  After much head-scratching, we found that one of his components was a weldment using structural members.  His weldment profile was an imported DXF of aluminum extrusion, and one of its faces was 0.00047 degrees off.  

RE: Frozen assembly components 2007

Can you add parts into the assy file and add mates between those parts only? i.e. not mated to existing parts in the main assy

cheers
Helpful SW websites FAQ559-520
How to find answers ... FAQ559-1091

RE: Frozen assembly components 2007

(OP)
I think the assembly is hosed.  It got so bad last night that if I dropped in a part and didn't mate it, it was immediately frozen where I dropped it.  CTRL-Q would free those unmated parts up, but all my other parts were frozen.

No, I'm not using flexible assemblies--complications within Animator doing that most of the time.  So each moving component is its own part or assembly.

Previously movable parts froze--all except one.  I got the file off to my VAR, and they think it's a bug, too.  It's definitely not the usual sort of problem.

There aren't many top-level mates in the assembly, since I'm building this only for animation.  I think I have something like 20 parts/sub-assemblies.  The trouble seemed to start when I CTRL-dragged another sub-assembly from the tree into the viewport (something I commonly do).  It placed the sub-assembly in the viewport twice and I found it in the tree twice--once at the bottom and once up near where I dragged from.  I deleted the extra sub-assembly, but it was already too late--hosed assembly.

Looks like its time to rebuild the assembly.  Ug.

Jeff Mowry
www.industrialdesignhaus.com
Reason trumps all.  And awe trumps reason.

RE: Frozen assembly components 2007

(OP)
I deleted my TEMP junk amidst diagnosis (DOH!).  The last time I had a truly corrupted SW file was in 1997, so I wasn't considering that as a possibility.  I suppose I could go dumpster-diving to find the assembly in the recycle bin--I'll check that out.

Meanwhile, I do have an intact assembly file I can go back to, but it's much more primative.  After thinking about it overnight, if I don't get a useful file from the recycle bin, I think I'd rather rebuild from scratch than go back to the primordial assembly I built upon originally.  My clients are somewhat new to SW, and they've imported a lot of geometry from some other CAD system--so the origin/plane locations for most every part/assembly are totally worthless.  A new assembly will fix that and make in-assembly headaches minimal.

Ug again.

Jeff Mowry
www.industrialdesignhaus.com
Reason trumps all.  And awe trumps reason.

RE: Frozen assembly components 2007

(OP)
OK, I just made a discovery with this issue.  Beware.  Below, I've posted an excerpt of my email back to my VAR to explain what's going on:

Quote:

I believe I figured out the problem with the assembly--definitely a bug.  I just finished rebuilding the assembly from scratch up to the point where it failed yesterday.  It's either the addition of folders for components in the tree, or the rearranging of the components in the tree, or both.  I've uploaded the latest file before failure (got smart and started saving incremental changes this time), and before any rearranging of components in the tree.  Right after adding folders and rearranging, the parts froze up.

I'm letting my VAR play with the assembly to find out which specific thing I did is causing the problems.  I'll post back if I hear anything new.

Jeff Mowry
www.industrialdesignhaus.com
Reason trumps all.  And awe trumps reason.

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