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Mating Tips

Symmetric Mate

Width Mate

Path Mate

Linear/Linear Coupler Mate

Distance With Limit Mate

Hinge Mate

Multi-Mate

Cam Mate

Rack & Pinion Gear Mate

Screw Mate

What We’ll Cover

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3 Typically

Can a part be fully constrained with one mate?

How Many Mates Do We Need?

SolidWorks Advanced Mates

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Try to use a common mate reference

Long chains of mates take longer to solve

Do not create mate loops:

Do not over define mates:

Mating Tips

SolidWorks Advanced Mates

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Drag components to test their available degrees of freedom.

If a component is causing problems, it is often easier to delete all

its mates and re-create them instead of diagnosing each one.

Use Sub-Assemblies at the top level assembly.

More Mating Tips

SolidWorks Advanced Mates

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Allows two similar entities to be symmetric about a face or plane

Features allowed:

Points

Planes or planar faces

Spheres of equal radius

Cylinders of equal radius

Symmetric Mate

SolidWorks Advanced Mates

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Centers a tab within the width of a groove

Tab references: (purple)

Two parallel faces

Two non-parallel planer faces (with or without draft)

One cylindrical face or axis

Width Mate

SolidWorks Advanced Mates

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Constrains a selected point to a path

Path Mate

SolidWorks Advanced Mates

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Used to establish a translation relation between components

Can pretty much use any entity to create this mate

Linear/Linear Couple Mate

SolidWorks Advanced Mates

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Limits the movement of a component within a specified range of

travel allowing some freedom of movement

Limit mates take longer to solve

Distance With Limit Mate

SolidWorks Advanced Mates

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Creates a concentric and coincident mate at the same time

Can also limit the angular movement

Hinge Mate

SolidWorks Advanced Mates

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Use one common reference to mate multiple parts with the same

type of mates

Condense mates into a folder

Multi Mate

SolidWorks Advanced Mates

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Cam profile must be a series of tangent faces that form a closed

loop

Mate a plane, cylinder, or point

Can profile can be:

Lines

Arcs

Splines

Cam Mate

SolidWorks Advanced Mates

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Linear translation of one component (the rack) causes circular

rotation in another component (the pinion)

You can mate any two components to have this type of movement

relative to each other. The components do not need to have gear

teeth.

Rack & Pinion Mate

SolidWorks Advanced Mates

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Constrains two components to be concentric

Translation of one component along the axis causes rotation of

the other according to pitch relationship

Screw Mate

SolidWorks Advanced Mates