Solidworks working time.

Well done Solidworks!
I have not had a crash for three weeks now and I am working a heavy cpu
demanding project.

Now this "may" be irrelevant, but what I did was to look at every
sub-assembly, then suppressed every part/assembly, except the first two in
the tree.

After doing this, I looked at the mates between the two remaining parts/
assemblies and found that they were not at the top of the mate tree.

This happens due to design changes, parts replaced and even moving
parts/assemblies up and down the tree.
Perfectly normal when designing, but why do the mates not move automatically
up/down the mates tree, with the parts/assemblies?

I then moved the mate to be at the top of the tree and continued down the
tree, un-suppressing each part/assembly in turn, then moving the mates up
the mate tree to correspond to the assembly.

A bonus of this action, is that you can see that the parts/assemblies, are
not constrained in the assembled order.
I can see why, this would give Solidworks, a headache!

This has not only reduced the crashing but has also improved the document
opening speeds.

This takes time and is sooooooo boring, but it has helped a lot.

Now is there an automatic way of doing this or can it be added to future
releases?

 

wow, that is some great investigation. how did you think of that? That
would be a great additional feature. Only other thing I can think of
is writing a macro to rename and move mates. Very interesting. Thanks.

Josh
www.solidsmack.com

 

Now is there an automatic way of doing this or can it be added to

I don't know of an automatic way, but my assemblies generally end up this
way. I use the option to create a folder for the mates created when I exit
the mate tool, and then I go name the folder. This way, I have the mates
that constrain a component in a labeled package that I can use to quickly
find the relevant mates later. This has the added benefit of helping me
keep over/underconstrained conditions under control, and puts the mates in
some sort of order.

The mate solver is supposed to solve them all simultaneously, but I have
also noticed that reordering mates can clear a rebuild problem. I don't
know nearly enough about the solver to make a guess as to why this might
be.

 

I believe the solution of the mates is a matrix solution. Why on earth
they wouldn't optimize the matrix before solving is beyond me. Now I
am in the habit of rearranging the feature tree according to part
number and perhaps by folders. This could play havoc with assembly
times. It also points out that this reordering may need to be done
frequently. I am not sure the API has a way to sort the feature tree.

TOP

 

AFAIK, Solidworks solves the mates all at the same time - I think they
licence the DCM from D-Cubed, which is a non-sequential solver. So
rearranging the mates will have no effect on that, surely? So it must
be something else the OP is doing that's causing the changes.