Mirror an assembly

jerry_palardy

Looks like it has been a couple of years since someone has asked this question, so maybe the answer has changed...

Is there a way to create a mirror image of an entire assembly?   

This is for a middle school robotic team.  They were constructing an asymmetrical drivetrain and made the mistake of making two left sides.  Now, they are trying to revise one to be the right, but it has proven trickier than expected.  They used CAD (Onshape) to design a rough drivetrain concept but stopped there.  I would like to be able to say that had they completed the full left side in CAD, they could have easily created the mirror image in CAD and then referenced that during construction, to save a bunch of time.

Pattabi_Kakumanu

@jerry_palardy

It is not possible to directly mirror the complete assembly. However, there is a good workaround to achieve this.

Go to the assembly you want to mirror and then create the in-context part. After that, you can mirror the complete assembly in a part studio. Later, you can insert it into an assembly to create the assembly structure.

Please check the attached video on how to do it. Let me know if you need any further information.

Pattabi_Kakumanu

Here is the video
.

Yam_S

we are talking about it on the "improvment request" forum for a long time.

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/5763/mirror-feature-for-assembly-workflow#latest

vote/comment as well.

edward_petrillo

@jerry_palardy-kudos for mentoring a robotics team!  

There's no doubt that @Pattabi_Kakumanu's workaround is an appropriate solution in many circumstances. Your students might get more benefit in the long term by starting over and using Onshape's multipart modeling capability, which is especially well-suited to dealing with parts that have a symmetric relationship to one another, such as a robot drivetrain. The origin of the parts studio should correspond to the center of the robot in the x-y plane.  Part geometry can be mirrored in sketches so that the mirrored parts can be extruded in the same feature, or one member of a symmetric pair can be created and then mirrored with the part mirror tool.  A futher advantage of this approach is that the finished parts can be inserted into a top-level assembly in their intended positions and thereby make constraining the assembly with mates much simpler.  My high school robotics team has been using this approach for several  years, and I cannot recall a situation where the absence of an asembly mirror capability has been a significant obstacle.  If you are able to share a robot model, I could attempt to illustrate this approach directly.

joshua_targownik

is there a way to do this for a large assembly (hundreds of parts)? part studio can't handle it. this is such a fundamental feature it's hard to believe it's missing.