mating a cam

I have a arm that I need to move back and forth and I want to use a cam to
move it back and forth. The arm is pinned at the top so it can swing, and I
want a hole that is lower on the arm that I want the cam to run off of. the
cam is an eccentric shaft (an offset shaft) so if I rotate the shaft the arm
will move back and forth.If I set a coincident mate to the shaft and a
tangent mate to the cam and the hole in the arm. Should this not work? I
would like to show a dynamic motion of this movement.

Thanks

Nathan Feculak

 

Nathan,

If you are using SW2004 you need to add a 'cam' mate not a tangent mate to
the hole (when the mate dialogue box appears in the FM, select the 'advanced
mates' tab).

If you have mated it all correctly and you have set any sub-assemblies to
'flexible' (this only works if your sub-assmebly has the appropriate degrees
of freedom in it's mates) then it should rotate OK. If it does, you can use
dynamic motion to assign a rotary or linear motor to the appropriate part of
your assembly and have SW do the movement for you. If this works OK, and
you have animator, you can then record an AVI of this motion.

Merry

 

Just a thought; I hope the hole you put in the lower part of the arm is
a slot that will allow the eccentricity of the cam to freely move
towards and away from the arm axis. Obviously, without this, the system
would bind and could not be made to work in either the real world OR in
SolidWorks.

Sincerely,
Jerry Forcier