From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2019 Essential Training

Mechanical mates - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2019 Essential Training

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Mechanical mates

- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to be taking a look at a handful of the mechanical mates. The first thing I want to do is go up here and turn on the make tool, click on mate. And come down here, instead of standard mates, let's go ahead and look at mechanical mates. And the very first mechanical mate here is a cam mate. So click on the cam mate. As far as the cam path, let's go ahead and zoom in here and take a look at this shape here, which I've already predefined as a cam. Go ahead and click on that bottom surface there. And the cam follower, let's go ahead and choose this one right here. Notice those two surfaces come together, and now we've established a cam mate. If I rotate this component here, notice that little cam follower just automatically follows along, on top of that cam. Alright, so that is the first one which is a cam mate. The next one is a slot mate. Slot mate's pretty straight forward and simple. I'm going to go ahead and choose this slot right here, and I'm going to choose this pin. Those are going to slide together, click on okay, and now you've got this mate that allows this pin to slide in the slot, but be 100% contained in that slot so that is driving the path of where that pin can go. Okay, next thing's going to be a hinge mate. So choose the hinge mate here. The concentric sections is going to be the outside of this pin here and the inside here. And then the coincident sections are going to be the end of this pin here, and the end of this piece over here as well. Click on okay, and now we've got a hinge mate. Now a hinge mate is basically a combination of a concentric mate as well as coincident mate. So basically does two mates in one with that mechanical hinge mate. Alright, next one we're going to look at is the gear mate. So choose the gear mate right over here. I'm going to go ahead and spin my model around, and as far as my mate selection, I'm going to choose the major diameter of the big gear. That one right there. And let's go ahead and also choose the major diameter of the small gear. Select that one, and now you can see here we have a gear ratio of six to one, and those diameters are being pulled from those actual measurements of those gears. Now this doesn't necessarily have to be a gear. It could be two wheels that are rubbing on each other or pushing on each other, it could be a belt and pulley system, you can have all types of different functions here as long as it's operating similar to what you might see with two gears meshing together. Once you have the ratio you want, go ahead and click on okay, and now I should be able to rotate one of these gears around and the other one automatically spins around. So a couple different things that are happening there to get that gear interaction. Alright, below that is the rack and pinion. Rack and pinion, pretty straight forward. As far as the rack, you generally want to choose some straight edge on there, and I'm going to choose this bottom edge right there. Now as far as the pinion gear, I'm going to go ahead and choose the major diameter, again, of this small gear. So choose that one there, and that is my pinion gear. And down here, you can also change that diameter if you want to adjust it a little bit, but right now it's pulling the three inches from the actual measurement on that gear, and that looks just fine to me. Go ahead and choose the green check mark, click on that, and now we should be able to slide this back and forth, and all the gears and everything else moves. Okay, moving on, let's go over here to the screw mate. So click on the screw mate. Let's go ahead and spin this around over here. And as far as my mate selection here, I'm going to choose the outside of this screw here. I'm going to go ahead and try to choose the inside of the other piece, or you can actually choose the outside of the circle here. So either one of those should work just fine. And now you can choose the ratio. So I'm going to say an one to one ratio is just fine, click on okay, and now as I move these gears around or this cam around, you can see that the screw is driving that rotation here by going up and down with this one screw is rotating this other piece over here around that shape. And you can also do the same thing by going and driving that component around. Spin around here, so you can see we can easily move things around by moving these component, okay. So that is the screw mate. And the next one is going to be the universal joint. So choose the universal joint. And as far as the selections there, I'm going to choose this main shaft right over here. You can see it's protruding over here. And my second selection's going to be this shaft right over here. And it doesn't really matter what these pieces look like. It's assuming that between the two, you have some type of a real universal joint type of mechanism, and this tool is going to simulate that type of motion. Click on the green check mark. Now of course I've already defined a few other relationships over here ahead of time. So now if I spin this over here, notice we can rotate this one over here. It did look like this cam here happened to pop up on the other side, and sometimes you will get some anomalies like that if you have too many mates going on. If you do have an issue like that, I do want to point out down here are your mates. So you can click and look at those mates, and here's that cam follower. You can always just delete that mate if they're causing trouble, get it down to where it needs to be. You can spin this around to see the action, and if you want to go back and add that mate, of course go back over here, come down to mechanical mates, come up here to that cam mate, come up here to the cam path, choose this one here, the cam follower. That one right there. Those come together, and everything's back to working and looking good.

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