corrupted assembly mates: cause and solution?

Greetings all,

I am working on a mid-size assembly that contains 3 sub-assemblies and approximately 70 parts in total. All components in the main and sub- assemblies are fully mated, none floating or fixed.

About 3 times now I have rebuilt (as prompted upon opening) my main assembly, with the result being that approximately 40% of all my components' mates are overdefining, or otherwise invalid. About 50% of all components show either a (?) or (+) in front of them. I've completely rebuilt the assembly twice now, once from scratch, the second time by simply deleting all the mates and re-mating, but it keeps doing this.

Why on earth is this happening, and how can I recover from it? I've tried deleting and/or redefining what SW is showing as the offending mates, but nothing seems to work - the assembly becomes completely muddled. Any advice or insight would be MOST appreicated. Thanks.

mr.ska
corruptmates.3.mrska@spamgourmet.com

 

[MadMango]

I've only noticed this sort of thing happening when I use Angle Mates in my assemblies. Now I always try to use Distance Mates. IMO, if you have any Angle Mates, I would try to use something else if it will provide the same end results. "Happy the Hare at morning for she is ignorant to the Hunter's waking thoughts."

 

[BBJT]

Hello Mr. Ska,
If I am understanding you correctly your saying that the assembly is fine when you save it and is a mess when you call it up? Is that correct? If so are you working in lightweight mode whem assembling more components to the assembly? The reason I ask is if the parts are loaded lightweight you will not see the mate or rebuild errors in the lightweight parts until you resolve or open the assembly again. We run into the situation where one user calls up an assembly in lightweight, adds a component, mates it and everything seems to be fine. Little did he or she know some of the mates conflicted with some other components mates that you would have never guessed would have been affected. The next guy or gal calls it up and BAM half of the tree is red. We opted not to use lightweight for this reason and I am currently addressing this with SolidWorks. I hope my rambling was not too far of the mark.

BBJT BBJT CSWP

 

[dsi]

Some of our designers have this problem now and again. In large assemblies, it takes only one bad or unresolved mate to corrupt the entire assembly. You will see that many mates become unresolved. Your best bet would be to open each sub-assembly and verify that they are mated properly. Again, as BBJT pointed out, resolve all of your components. Then, once the sub-assemblies are fixed, open the complete assembly and check each mate used to combine the individual sub-assemblies. Odds are, only one of your mates are unresolved. One you fix it, all of your other mates will fall back into place. DimensionalSolutions@Core.com
While I welcome e-mail messages, please post all thread activity in these forums for the benefit of all members.

 

[SnowCrash]

The thing that helps me here is to work on debugging from the bottom of the mate tree upwards.

Crashj

 

[odmullen]

Also check to make sure none of the subassemblies are rigid. Try setting them to "flexible" and see if some of the meatballs disappear. Use Distance = 0 instead of "coincident" (apparently more than a semantic distinction, but the deeper meaning escapes me). All I know is that sometimes it works.

 

[SBaugh]

This is a little time consuming but it may help you descover where the problem lies.

1) Suppress all the mates that have a Cherry on it.
2) Unsuppress a few at a time till the cherries reappear.
3) Once they reappear, start suppressing them again, exept this time do it one at a time.
4) You will narrow your search down to one or two mates that are causing the problem.
5) Depending on the type of mate I have found that by simply clicking "Aligned" or "Anti-Aligned(On)" will usally fix my error.

This doesn't always work, but at least you can narrow down your search to a few mates.

Sometimes deleting them and putting them back in will fix the problem, but that can be a pain in and of itself.

I hope that helps, Scott Baugh, CSWP
George Koch Sons,LLC
Evansville, IN 47714
sjb@kochllc.com