using the Fix command in and assembly

IsoTherm

Greetings,
I have a bad habit of creating parts with the wrong orientation and wind up manipulating them in assemblies later. I've tried using the Fix command on the central part of an assembly and then mating the rest of the assembly to that fixed part. If I then use that assembly later as a sub assembly, does the fix that I've placed on the central part of the sub assembly keep me from being able to manipulate that subassembly in the main assembly? I often find it hard to grab, move or rotate them unless I mate them to something and I can't figure out why. On a related note, if I make a group from a set of parts and then insert them into an assembly, and then later manipulate that assembly, I wind up with loose parts from the group all over the place. 
Just wondering.
Thanks
Isotherm 

Lavon

Hi @IsoTherm
No, fixing a part in a subassembly does not keep you from moving the subassembly around in the other assembly. Assemblies in Onshape are flexible, so whatever motion you have in the subassembly will be what you have in the next assembly. This goes for the group mate as well. If they cannot move relative to each other in the subassembly it will be the same in the other assembly.

john_mcclary

FIX is completely ignored in higher level assemblies. So lets say you insert a bunch of parts in an assembly and fix them all. They will all be floating when you add that assembly to a new assembly.

IsoTherm

huh. I must be doing something else that constrains some subassemblies. They seem stuck in one orientation once inserted into another assembly and can only be manipulated using a mate. It doesn't happen to all or even many of my subassemblies but often enough that I wanted to figure out the glitch. Any other ideas on why this would happen?

john_mcclary

Sometimes with larger assemblies Onshape just won't move parts... very annoying...

You can get by it by using the view manipulator and typing in a offset or angle.

IsoTherm

sometimes

john_mcclary

It does seem to be more obvious during the first day or two of an update... Wonder if if is coincidence or AWS being overloaded 

NeilCooke

This may be related to the number of mates in the subassembly - because subassemblies are flexible, Onshape has to solve all the mates in the top level and all subassemblies at the same time. If you want to just drag a large subassembly around on screen, for example if you are doing a factory layout, a quick workaround is to group all the parts in the subassembly (either at the top level or in the subassembly), then ungroup again after the move (if necessary). This prevents the subassembly mates from being solved. We are aware of this and are looking at possible solutions.

Jolly

NeilCooke said:

This may be related to the number of mates in the subassembly - because subassemblies are flexible, Onshape has to solve all the mates in the top level and all subassemblies at the same time. If you want to just drag a large subassembly around on screen, for example if you are doing a factory layout, a quick workaround is to group all the parts in the subassembly (either at the top level or in the subassembly), then ungroup again after the move (if necessary). This prevents the subassembly mates from being solved. We are aware of this and are looking at possible solutions.

This just helped me a bunch right now. I had a large assembly imported from SolidWorks that we spent awhile getting all mated up properly. Then I took that assembly into a top level assembly and I was just trying to move it into position via drag connectors and it was almost impossible.  Grouping it made it easily 15X faster. Note that I'm WFH on a cheap laptop with an integrated graphics card.