Mates that work for a part stop working in an assembly

[weirDeveloper]

I have tried drawing the rudder mechanism of my boat. The rudder is supposed to tilt up when it hits the bottom, but it isn't designed right - the tiller just hits the deck and prevents the rudder from tilting high enough. I'm making a drawing I can send to the boat designer for his advice.

The rudder shaft in my assembly is supposed to tilt ( I haven't drawn the tiller in yet), pivoting on the pin in the top support. When I try to move the rudder shaft, I can slide it up and down, and I can turn the rudder, but not tilt it. If I try to move the top support, I just get the message that it is fully defined and can't move.

The top support moves correctly when it isn't in the assembly. I've added and removed and changed mates in the assembly till I'm blue in the face, but I still can't get the rudder to tilt. It seems there must be a mate in the assembly that 'fully defines' the top support and stops it moving, but I can't see it.

I'd really appreciate it if someone could take a look and see what I'm missing. There are just 15 or so mates...

Thanks a lot,

John

 

[ShaggyPE]

you need to set your lower assembly to "flexible" within your upper assembly.

Investigate "flexible assembly" within the help for further information.

-Dustin
Professional Engineer
Pretty good with SolidWorks

 

[weirDeveloper]

Great. Thanks very much.

 

[maxh3]

Embarrassingly, I once designed an entire machine, over a hundred part files, in one single top level assembly before I learned that sub-assemblies had a setting called "flexible", which was turned off by default.