Fasteners on curved surface

[TheWorks]

Working on a sheet metal assembly where I need to put some screws through the side wall of a circular cylinder. But SolidWorks refuses to properly mate the screws to the holes in the assembly. Can't add any relations to get the screws properly positioned relative to the holes, and Smart Fasteners won't do it properly either.

Can someone please post a short how-to explaining how this is done, or send me an example file illustrating it. Thanks.

 

[Theophilus]

Well, one way to do it is to create some sort of geometry that coincides with your holes--so in your curved part you may add a plane that goes through your holes' centers. Mate one of your fasteners' planes to this plane and you'll be lined up in one degree of motion.

You may need to use a piece of sketch geometry to line up your fasteners axially to your holes (point, line, whatever in a sketch on the new plane you created) which you can use to make a concentric mate (actually pins down two degrees of motion right there).

For the last degree of motion, I think you can mate the flat surface of your fastener to be tangent to your cylindrical face.



Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

Reason trumps all. And awe transcends reason.

 

[smcadman]

Turn on Temporary axis.
Mate axis of screw with axis of hole
Mate plane of screw with axis of cylinder
Tangent mate of face of cylinder with bottom head of screw.

SW07 SP2.0

Flores

 

[TheWorks]

Thanks guys. Smcadman, your solution was great. All I had to do was turn on the temporary axis, do a Coincident mate between the screw axis and the axis of the hole, and then a Tangent mate between the bottom side of the screw head and the cylinder wall.

Do you guys know how I can now semi-automate this process ? I have about 20 screw holes around the circumference to fill this way, times about 20 joints to do this for. Any ideas ? Thanks.

 

[handleman]

I wouldn't mate all the screws. Ideally you can use a feature-driven component pattern. Otherwise SW has a bunch of mates to solve. A component pattern takes much fewer resources to solve. The only thing to watch for is to try to avoid mating additional components to patterned instances of a component.

 

[TheWorks]

Handleman, thanks. I used a mate for the first screw, then a circular component pattern to fill the rest. Worked great.

 

[Heckler]

In situations like this I use reference planes or axis in a fashion that's simialiar to Pro/E Skeleton Parts for Assembly Management.

Best Regards,

Heckler
Sr. Mechanical Engineer
SWx 2007 SP 2.0 & Pro/E 2001
Dell Precision 370
P4 3.6 GHz, 1GB RAM
XP Pro SP2.0
NVIDIA Quadro FX 1400
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