Matte Connectors

terry_pike

I'm still wrapping my head around mate connectors and I have no problem clicking on the dot and going to another dot. And If I want to flip the primary axis, no problem there. But those secondary axis' is giving me an issue of trying to understand them. I've looked through the videos on matte connectors, but didn't see one that discussed these different axis. Does anybody have a resource which discusses them? Even the help file didn't mention them while searching through it. Thank you!

philip_thomas

The Onshape mating philosophy (once understood) is far more efficient than the traditional low level approach used by older CAD systems.
There is a very simple hierarchy.

• Mate Connection Points are points automatically generated and offered on faces and edges.
• A Mate Connector is a coordinate system generated explicitly or implicitly (on the fly), attached to or offset from a Mate Connection Point.
• A Mate defines the degrees of freedom (and range of motion limits), between two Mate Connectors.

In this way, any two parts can be mated with ONE mate. It is brutally efficient.

Most of the mates align the primary (blue) axis. 
The secondary axes (red and green) can be used to clock (rotate by 90 degrees) or incremented (eg to ensure that the teeth of gears mesh correctly).
The only time that i find myself setting the secondary axis direction is for pin/slot mates where the centerline of the slot does not lie along one of the primary axes.

Below is an example of a large scale mated assembly that i was unable to complete in SolidWorks but was trivial in Onshape.
There are many training resources available in the Learning Center and in the video library that cover mating.






https://cad.onshape.com/documents/525f6825c5afea4f62f8f12b/w/57ef053b99a688e1234be38f/e/716d3999600ce591b6b6bc28