How do I mate these parts?

Cadman

See the image attached. I need to mate the 45 deg braces into the corners of this Plant Stand but can't find a mate connector that will do this without me having to do some guessing on the movement to align the two faces.



Any ideas?

Randy

philip_thomas

^ what he said

_Ðave_

I hope this vid helps using planar mates.

_Ðave_

I think that planar mates would work for this.

philip_thomas

^ what he said

philip_thomas

As with all questions like this - making the document public will get you much better answers much faster.
The people here (myself included) cannot resist fixing stuff.
If you ask for a written description as an answer to a complicated problem, most people simply move on  

_Ðave_

▲What He Said▲ 

_Ðave_

I would have made a gif showing the planar mate from your model but I don't want to make your model since you obviously already did the work. Yes I'am lazy!!

matthew_menard

Is this something that would be recommended to be made as a multi part studio instead of an assembly?

philip_thomas

Matthew - the answer to your question depends on what feels natural to you.

Personally, i would use a single part studio to make one of each part - essentially one corner of this design. 
Once the parts were designed, i would reference them in an assembly and build them there.
The benefit of using a single part studio, is that i can create interpart relationships (a change in a notch on one part propagates to a tab on the mating parts). The benefit of only building one instance of each part and  then assembling them in an assembly is that i am not wasting time/effort designing the same part over and over in the part studio.

Counterpoint: you could build a layout sketch in a single part studio and build all the parts in that environment. This 'can' be slightly simpler faster in some situations, but the main limiting factor becomes motion - motion is what assemblies are for and so there would still be the process of importing the parts into an assembly and mating them.

sorry for all the words, but this is an important topic

Cadman

Thank you everyone for your input so far. BUT... first of all, the model is public. It's called Plant Stand and any of you are welcome to have a look at it. Secondly, I did make only one instance of this wedge shape and I am attempting to assemble it in an assembly. My issue is that I can't find a mate connector that will allow me to mate the 2 faces and position the piece correctly. Basically, I need to simulate real life, in that I would put one face against one of the runners, then slide it until it hit the other face of the second runner. In addition, I need to be able to position it vertically using either dimensions or some other connector so it is basically in the center of the runner.

I am an old CAD guy with over 21 years in the CAD business, 14 of which were with ComputerVision Corp. and/or PTC. I still have a copy of DesignWave, which was created by ComputerVision and then became ProDeskTop when PTC bought ComputerVision. I have used and helped design a number of CAD/CAM packages and I am a big proponent of OnShape. Having said that, I have seen many different methods of mating parts, some good some not so good. DesignWave/ProDeskTop also has face mating capability, but with a bit more freedom, at least from what I can see so far. I hope I am just missing something as this seems to be a simple, and probably common, scenario.

Thank you all in advance for your input. I am a big believer in Forums such as these as they a great way for us all to learn.

Randy

_Ðave_

I hope this vid helps using planar mates.

brucebartlett

I was going to explain how I would tackle this, but found it easier just to make a short video. Watch it here

Hope this help's. Someone was also asking about a table legs on the forum last week, I'd do that the same way. 

Cadman

Thank you to all who have responded to this discussion. I have been able to solve this however and as it turns out it is easier than I thought.
I started by Plane Mating one face of the 'wedge' to the appropriate face of the crossbar, then do the same with the other face of the wedge and the appropriate face of the other crossbar and it moved into place just as I expected.

Thank you all again. This is a great place for finding out about issues like this.