After a long break from writing, I have decided that I will make my return with the long promised series about SolidWorks Mates. The next few posts will cover every aspect of mating in SolidWorks. If you found this article after Googling mates and mating thinking you would find some cools tricks to help you in the bedroom, you clicked the wrong link. For the rest of you, we are going to start today with a brief overview of what are mates and some of the best practices. Then in coming articles I will go in detail about each available mate in SolidWorks 2009.

What are Mates?

I know a lot of my readers are fully aware of what mates are but there maybe a couple newcomers to SolidWorks who have only briefly heard about mates. Mates are relationships between parts in an assembly that often represent how parts in an assembly are put together when manufactured. Parts floating in 3D space have six degrees of freedom that mates are then used to constrain.

To better understand the 6 degrees of freedom, look at the Reference Triad above. Each unconstrained part can freely move along any of the 3 axes: X,Y and Z. The translation along these axes count for 3 of the degrees of freedom while rotation about the three axes account for the other three. When a part in assembly cannot translate or rotate on any of thee axes then the part is part is fully constrained.

There are a number of mates available in a SolidWorks assembly that are used to fully constrain a part. The most common mates used in SolidWorks can be found in the Standard Mates section and they include Coincident, Parallel, Perpendicular, Tangent, Concentric, Lock, Distance and Angle. These mates are so common, many users can go their entire time using SolidWorks without using any of the more advanced mates. By the end of this series, hopefully you won’t be one of them.

Good Practices & Resolving Errors

In the SolidWorks Help, there are some great pages that provide you with a  list of best practices when using mates not to mention some of the articles that can be found online. And rather then reinvent the wheel, I just want to hit a couple of points to consider when applying mates. These are just somethings I run into when I am dealing with users at my day job and I feel that they are often overlooked.

• When you have mate errors in your assembly, don’t ignore them. The extra couple of minutes you take trying to solve a mate issue when it happens is a lot better then trying to debug an assembly with 5, 10 or 500 mate errors.
• When you have a mate error, look to see what components are being mated. Sometimes, a mate error is cause by a component being suppressed or deleted.
• If both of the components are resolved and you still get an error, trying rebuilding the assembly by pressing CTRL-Q on your keyboard. CTRL-Q rebuilds the entire assembly and this will sometimes resolve your error.
• If after rebuilding the assembly you still have an error, try dragging the component. Believe it or not, sometimes this will clear up the error.
• Another trick that sometimes work to resolve mate errors, is to suppress then unsuppress the mate. This is another one of those weird things that will sometimes cause SolidWorks to reevaluate the mate and resolve the issue.
• If all else fails, delete the mate from the Mates folder and re apply it. It is better to add a new mate then spend valuable time trying to debug a mate error….but that is just my opinion.
• Don’t be lazy. Don’t just lock the position of your component in an assembly. Yes, it saves you 2 minutes when creating the assembly but imagine the poor guy that has to make a revision to your assembly later.
• Try moving a part after mating it to see if it is indeed fully constrained. Sometimes, especially on more complex assemblies, it is easy to miss a mate or miss an issue with a mate.
• I cannot stress this last one enough…. Fully constrain your assembly. Making sure that your assembly is fully constrained will prevent issues later, especially when revising components in your assembly. At the very least constrain the parts as required to fulfill your design intent. One mate I often over look because it does not affect design intent is constraining the rotation of screws in holes and shafts that are design to move linearly.

Way More To Come…

This was meant to be just a quick introduction to the mating series and later posts will be more detailed. I will also be sure to point out more best practices as they become releavent to the discussion. If you have any best practices or tips to fix mate errors, I would love to hear them and I am sure everybody will find them helpful.

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