Mates is still pants

I have sat down with a coffee and a quiet smoke, before I come to write
this.
Why?
To calm myself down and write sensibly without going mad with anger! :-O

There is Still a very serious flaw in SW mates, that I thought had be
rectified, until this afternoon that was.
I was in a happy mood, and adding some sub- assemblies to a main assembly,
whilst doing my very bad impression of Elton John.

Then BANG the whole assembly fell to pieces, with red and yellow mate error
messages popping up under EVERY sub- assembly and in the main assembly!
ooer! :-S

When I say fell apart, I mean just that, with bit and pieces all over the
place and some sub-assemblies greyed out

No problem, just delete the last mate........ no that did not work.. mmmm
Even more mate errors came popping up..... ok stay calm......there must be
something I did wrong. |-)

Now just an hour before, I had found the references and copied these to cdr,
(I back up to cdr, at the end of the morning and at the end of the day),
pass experience taught me that.

The other thing I do, is to put each sub-assembly to main assembly, mates,
into a separate folder for each sub-assembly.

So booting up another pc, next to mine, I loaded up the backup copies and
looked at each sub-assembly in turn to see if there was any difference.

HA!, there was, one sub-assembly has a sheet metal part in it, a drip tray,
which WAS coincident mated in the main assembly, to a frame made from ERW
box section.

In the sub-assembly on the latest main assembly, this had CHANGED to a
tangent mate!
Opening the sub-assembly, showed me, that the mate had changed to a tangent
mate.

Unable to change the type of mate in the current assembly or sub-assembly,
(everything was greyed out), I deleted the tangent mate and re-established
the old coincident mate.
When I rebuilt the main assembly, ALL of the errors disappeared, and the
assembly went back to how it was, with all of the pieces re-establishing
their old mates

Now here are the questions,
1, why did this happen?
2, why was it allowed to happen, (with no error message, stating over
constrained, like normal).
3, And finally, why was a coincident mate CHANGED to a tangent mate?

Phew!, now where has that Elton John CD gone?, la la la le la )))

 

Pete,

I've experienced similar things, but never found a reason for them.

You didn't mention what version you're running. I'm using 05 SP.1 (mostly)

Mark

 

Ps, Even the main assembly and sub assembly that was checked-in to the
vault, this morning, had a coincident mate . weird I say, weird!

 

Yes you right, I'm running Sw2005 sp 0.1 with Xp pro Sp2

 

I feel your pain, I have been battling this type of scenario for a while.
Couldnt find out what was going on untill I read your post. I have managed
to replicate a similar coincident mate that changed to a tangent! This only
seems to happen in large assemblies, for me.

I am not sure but I have a sneaky supition that if you let the software
choose the original mate from the selected geometry and dont select it on
your own (i.e. before selectiing the parts choose coincident, then select
the parts and effectivly locking the mate type choice) that maybe on a
rebuild the software looks at the mate and re-chooses the mate style instead
and destroys things? Any chance anyone could give these scenarios a try? I
will see if I can make it happen on my assemby

So now that I know I havent lost as many marbles as I originally thought I
am going to treat my self to a TimHortons Double Double (You have to be
Canadian to understand the last comment)

Win 2000 SW 2005 SP 0.1 and I noticed we are both using PDM, coincidence?

Cheers,

Ben

 

Hi Pete,
Using 2005 sp0.1, Win 2k (no PDM and no Elton John).

I also noticed strange behavour with mates a few times, when adding mates
suddenly all went into red error. Checked the mates, but they had to be OK.
The solution which works for me most of the times is to Suppress the last
build mates until the red looks disappeared. After that I unsupress the
mates and then everything is OK.
Also noticed an angle mate which flipped by itself, have to re-edit the mate
to solve this problem (by pressing the "flip dimension" twice!).

\/\/im