From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2020 Essential Training

Mechanical Mates - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2020 Essential Training

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Mechanical Mates

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- Mechanical mates are really cool because we can create functional motion between components. Let's go ahead up here to the assembly tool bar, click on mate and go ahead and twirl up the standard mates and come down here to the mechanical mates and twirl that one down. So the very first of the mechanical mates is the cam mate so I'm going to choose the cam path, which is going to be the outside of this piece here and I'm going to choose the cam follower, which is this piece right over here. Those slide together, click on okay, and now we've created that mate. If I spin this component around here, notice what happens is that little cam follower just follows this cam path. Pretty handy. The next one is the slot mate, slot mate. I'm going to go ahead and choose a slot and then what I'd like to be inside of the slot, which is going to be that little pin. Click on okay and now that little pin should slide inside of the slot and it's constrained inside of that slot. All right, the hinge mate. Click on the hinge mate. My concentric sections. So I'd like to have the outside of this pin here and the inside of this little piece here. And my coincidence sections, I'd like to have the end of that and the end of this. Those slide together, click on okay, and now this is going to rotate around like a hinge. The gear mate. Let's click on that one there. Spin my model around here, I've got two different gears. This one is six inches, this one is three inches and so that's how we want to define it. Now on mate selections here, I want to choose the major diameters of each one of these. So I need to zoom in and click the major diameter here and zoom in down here and grab the major diameter there. So notice it automatically selects the size of those gears. So I have six to three, which is exactly the ratio I'm looking for. But if you had some other ratio and you want to modify it here, you could change the ratio right in here. You could also reverse it if you needed to. Click on okay and now if I move one of these components, the other one should automatically move as well. Pretty handy. So there is the gear mate. How about the rack and pinion mate? Click on rack and pinion. So my pinion pitch diameter, let's go ahead and, well first let's choose the rack. Actually want to choose a linear edge on the rack, so choose this edge down here, which is the bottom. And then here's my pinion gear. I'm going to go ahead and choose that major diameter, which it calls that as three, which is exactly what we want, right down there, click okay, and now if I move the rack it should move all the other components. All right, next one is going to be the screw mate. Click on the screw mate here. Now I've got a screw, I'm going to go ahead and choose this screw right here at the outside diameter of it and I'm going to choose either the inside edge, which is kind of hard to get to, or just choose the outside surface here. That's fine as well. And you can define the ratio. So right over here, it's going to be a one to one ratio, which is just fine, click on okay, and now if I were to move this component here. Let's try that again. Let's rotate this guy around here, you can see that that little piece will rotate around in a one to one relationship as I move this component here. So there it goes. So that is the screw mate. And then the universal joint. Click on the universal joint here. For this one, I'm going to go ahead and choose this rod and then I'm going to choose this other rod here. Now the interaction between the two doesn't really matter. I just have kind of a point there to define what it's looking like, but it can be anything. It is not in the same plane. And I'm going to choose the two, click on okay, and then if I rotate this handle around it should automatically drive that shaft, which then drives all these other components. So those are all the different mechanical mates you can do, you can see you can add quite a bit of great, realistic motion to your design by using these mechanical mates.

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