Confused mates

[tmalinski]

Using SW2006 Office, I have an assembly of a fixture that operates similar to a set of pliers, except that it’s more complicated than that. It has gripper jaws that are pinned to intermediate links, which are pinned to a sliding push pull mechanism. You push the slide the Jaws close, you pull the slide they open. I am using concentric and coincident mates on the pivot pins and a limit mate on the slide. My problem is when I drag the slide slowly with my mouse the mates work just as they should. But if I drag the mouse fast back and fourth they get totally confused and the jaws flip and get locked. Even the limit mate moves beyond its limit and errors. I have to close and re-open the assembly. I have also tried to animate this with the built in animator, but it has problems also as if the movements are too complicated and it stalls out the animator. I'm not a newbie but this has me stumped...Are there bugs with mates with SW2006??

tom

 

[SBaugh]

Maybe it is the way it is mated is why it's failing... The big key here to me is don't drag it really fast... As far as I can tell there are no problems with Mates in SW06. Have you contacted your VAR to what they have to say?

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP

http://www.scottjbaugh.com

faq731-376

 

[Heckler]

Tom,

Maybe you can rearrange the mates that operate the plier to their own mate group. I'm not experiencing any issue with mates on 2006. But I'm not using 2006 in production yet.....we're still doing internal testing. All mates have to be solved so you might want to develope another mate scheme.



When you create a new assembly, an empty mategroup is automatically included in the FeatureManager design tree. Each mating relationship that you create is added to this mategroup. The entry for each mating relationship includes the names of the components involved.

All the mates within a mategroup are solved together; the order in which they appear within the mategroup does not matter.

You can perform operations such as Replace Mate Entities on all the mates in a mategroup by selecting the mategroup in the FeatureManager design tree.

You can add mates to a folder within a mategroup to sort the mates. Right-click the mates and select Add to New Folder or drag the mates into an existing folder. Additionally, you can select the Add to new folder check box under Options in the Mate PropertyManager.


Best Regards,

Heckler
Sr. Mechanical Engineer
SW2005 SP 5.0 & Pro/E 2001
Dell Precision 370
P4 3.6 GHz, 1GB RAM
XP Pro SP2.0
NIVIDA Quadro FX 1400
o
_`\(,_
(_)/ (_)

"Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success." - Henry Ford

 

[TateJ]

One "undocumented feature" I've seen with my mates on larger assemblies... Don't over-use mates. Try to be frugal with them & use only enough. In oher words... Don't use a coincident when a parallel will do the job. It's hard to come up with specific examples... Just look back thru your mates & see if you can "frugalize" them. 99% of the time you can get away with over-using... but maybe you hit the 1% this time.

Windows 2000 Professional / Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer
SolidWorks 2006 SP01.0 / SpaceBall 4000 FLX
Diet Coke with Lime / Dark Chocolate
Lava Lamp​

 

[tmalinski]

Sorry for not responding sooner, I've been out of town. Thank you all for your suggestions. I will try to simplify the mates to see if they work better. In my 1st post, the only reason I drag them quickly is to see if I can make them fail. I thought that this may give me an indication of why the animator stalls out.

When applying mates is there a “preferred order of use for efficiency”? If one mate can take the place of two is it better? Or is this actually more complex for SolidWorks to calculate? If two plates each have a hole of the “same size” and I want one to rotate about the other, I could simply use a coincident mate on the edges of the holes, or I could use a coincident mate on the surfaces and a concentric mate on the holes. Is one preferred?

Thanks
Tom…

 

[TateJ]

Unfortunately... what I told you is more of a "rule of thumb" for me... I don't have any hard data to back it up. I'll try to test a few assemblies & see if there's measurable data to support my theory... maybe.

Windows 2000 Professional / Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer
SolidWorks 2006 SP01.0 / SpaceBall 4000 FLX
Diet Coke with Lime / Dark Chocolate
Lava Lamp​