compressed spring

Hello All,

I am creating an animation using an exploded view. Does anyone know
of a way to show a spring compressing? I have two configs of the
spring, one compressed and the other uncompressed. Can I swap out the
parts during the animation? Any help would be appreciated.

 

You have to make the spring dynamic by constraining it, Probably
equations tied to it's height. And create it using rev count. I
beleive Mike Wilson has an example

http://www.mikejwilson.com/solidworks/solidworks_files-05.htm

 

There is an example of using a spring in an animation in the download
area of the Colorado SolidWorks User Group website, cosug.com

 

Thanks to both of you for your help and the websites. Hopefully, I can
figure it out.

 

I have a couple of springs that can be easily used for animations.

The links below will allow you to download the compression spring, and
an
extension and torsion spring I had laying around. The models are for
education on modeling strategy only - I did not look up any springs for

real, nor did I take a ton of time to clean up the models the way I
would if
I was doing them for a customer/delivering to a customer.


www.edeaton.com/SwxDownload/Torsion_spring.zip
www.edeaton.com/SwxDownload/Extension_spring.zip
www.edeaton.com/SwxDownload/Compression_spring.zip


By the way, the compression spring is kind of cool because it shows a
trick
for getting equations to evalaute betwen frames in an animation. I
needed
the spring to be equation driven so anyone could use it to add coils,
change
diameter, etc without doing a lot of reconstruction. The spring I did
a few
years ago used equal sketch relations to flex the spring, so it would
be a
lot of work to make any change. I figured I ought to beat the
limitation if
I was going to share it.