Help on flexible mates?

I've never used flexible mates much and was wondering if there is some
tutorial help somewhere on the subject. There doesn't seem to be anything
in the online tutorial and the help file is very brief.
When I put a subassembly into a higher assembly, things don't work.
An example is a common machine slide assembly (Slide.Sldasm).
Carriage.Sldasm has the usual mates to keep it running on the ways of
Base.Sldasm and maybe a limit mate for the x travel. I put Slide.Sldasm
into a higher level assembly, e.g. Machine.Sldasm, and then in FM->Component
Properties for Slide.Sldasm, I check Solve as Flexible.
I then constrain Tool.Sldprt to a face within Carriage.Sldasm.
I can use the mouse and the grab tool (Move Component) and the combination
of Carriage.Sldasm and Tool.Sldprt will move within the X travel limits.
While this looks cool, it serves no purpose.
If I try to put a mate on Tool.Sldprt to locate it relative to anything
within Machine.Sldasm (and pull Carriage.Sldprt along with it), I get
overdefined errors all over the place and nothing moves.
In a new swx release, I often don't have time to research whether a new
feature actually works, so I'll continue to use an old method, and I think I
have for 2 or 3 releases in this case.
I certainly hope I have missed something.

Thanks, Bill

 

forgot to mention: sw2006sp4

 

This should have been posted as a followup (reply) in the thread you started
titled "Help on flexible mates?".

Apparently you're new to the Usenet. This will help get you started;

The Usenet Newbie Project
http://tgos.org/newbie

--
Black Dragon

He boil my first cabbage, make it awfully hot,
But when he put in the bacon, oooh, you know it overflow the pot.
-- Bessie Smith, "Empty Bed Blues"

 

Kman,
I didn't follow what you meant about multiple configs of the slide. There is
only one.
Tool.sldprt is a top level component to be used for driving the motion of
Carriage.sldasm.
There is no option for "Solve as Flexible" on Carriage.sldasm, only on
Slide.sldasm

The feature mgr would look something like this:

Machine.sldasm (top level)
|
|----Slide.sldasm ("Solve as Flex" chkd)
| |
| |----Base.sldasm (Static)
| |
| |----Carriage.sldasm (2B movable)
|
|
|----Tool.Sldprt (mate for this moves carriage?)


Hopefully, word wrapping doesn't mess this up...

thanks,
bill

 

I was just experimenting with another sample assembly and found that the
problem may be
that the "movable" portion of Slide.sldasm is a subassembly
(Carriage.Sldsasm). In another
trial, the equivalent of Carriage.Sldasm was instead Carriage.Sldprt, and it
worked OK.

Apparently there's some kind of issue with a subassy within a flexible assy.
This was a vendor supplied
assembly, so I'll have to see if I can recreate the problem with my own
assemblies.

Bill

 

What you are doing sounds like it should work to me.
One thing that may cause the "over constrained problem" is the type of mate
you are trying to apply at the top level.

e.g. if you are trying to apply a distance mate between faces of the Tool
and Machine, it might think they are not perfectly parallel and fail
(because of internal computational tolerances / rounding errors etc). An
alternative would be to make the distance mate between the origin of the
Tool and a face of the Machine that is normal to the direction of travel.

Worth a try.....


John H