NX5 Assemblies: Tangent to swept feature

[adrag]

Don't know what the best course of action would be here. I created a helix, then swept a rectangle along the guide using the "swept" feature to create the groove you see. I have an outer sleeve with a pin protruding and I want to make the guide tangent to the pin. I already have an "align" constraint between the outer and inner sleeves. And I'm getting an error when I try to apply the "tangent" constraint. I tried applying the "tangent" to the face of the pin and to the edge but both give me an error. Ultimately, I would like to be able to constrain the two so that the inner sleeve is concentric to the outer and when I reposition the inner sleeve in or out, it rotates according to the pitch I specified.

Al

 

[JohnRBaker]

Have you tried using Assembly Constraints instead of Mating Conditions?

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

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[hudson888]

What I suspect no matter what type of mating condition or constraint that you use is that you may have some small problems with the geometry itself. Constraints may be more tolerant in the way they can be applied but I also suspect that your swept groove will struggle to keep the sort of perfect squareness to the axis of the roller than allows face to face tangential contact to be correctly expressed. The solution then is to use an edge or better still the axis and a spine curve groove to describe the theoretical contact. You can select curves and edges in mating and I find for these kinds of things that works better.

I was using similar methods for animations and finding that the over centre rotation of any cam or geared mechanism using constraints was giving me headaches by swapping sides.

Best Regards

Hudson

www.jamb.com.au

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