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Newbie question: How can I center 2 parts in an Assembly ... at a fixed offset distance?
john_smith077
Member Posts: 175 ✭✭✭
Hello
1. How can I align the centers of Part A and Part B in the X dimension?
2. How can I fix the sparation distance between the two edges to a specific distance? (e.g. 2mm)
Note: I have applied a Planar Mate to the back face of Part A and Part B.
Background
Part of my problem is that I have two 45 degree chamfers facing each other, rather than two parallel faces...
Many thanks
J
PS My apologies for the novice question, but I am stuck!
PPS Is there any way to insert an image into these forum posts without them going full-width?
0
Comments
If so how do you set it up?
In truth I would like a to be able to set up a global set of variables that I can use in any Part Studio, as well as in any Assembly.
[Should I enter this as a separate question?]
J
Then edit the offset as needed
*Edit* Opps I see this was answered while I was answering too
So instead you would add a mate connector in the partstudio and use your variable defined offset there. Then fasten it in the assembly
They didn't say when grobal variables will be coming out. But they showed off a demo at the live event. They talked like it could be any update now.
So to get clear, as things stand there is no way to even share a master set of Variables between different Part Studios, yes?
J
there are a few methods, but the simplest one would be to use the "superderive" featurescript and check the "import variables" option.
You will need to import at least one object from the partsudio. If you only want the variables, then create blank sketch or a plane to import.
SuperDerive | SuperDerive (onshape.com)
this is something I do often in Onshape, and it works great.
You can see how many variables I'm using by the size of the scroll bar
Import in partstudios is very inefficient though. since it needs to load the entire partstudio each update.
but if you create one 'master variable partstudio' with only a single importable feature (like a sketch) then it will speed things up.
But like I said, this will all be obsolete once global variables comes out. Hopefully in the next month or two? ? ?
I had a situation where I had a number of items with planar faces, some of which were at odd angles and orientations. My challenge was to position new items in an assembly at the one place where the new item's face A was a fixed distance from one existing face, face B was a fixed distance from another existing face, and face C, a fixed distance from a third.
A planar constraint with an input for an offset distance would have been exactly perfect for this. But since that doesn't seem to exist, I created a part studio called "Spacer Block" that was just a simple cube with a configuration table that set the size of the cube to various dimensions that were important to my design. When I needed to put a new item into my assembly I threw in a couple of appropriately sized spacer blocks along with it and then set planar constraints on those for both the new item and the existing assembly. Once new item was correctly positioned in the assembly, I just turned off the visibility of the spacers.
In my case, I didn't need to worry about gross properties of the overall assembly, like volume or center of mass, that could have been messed up by the spacer blocks, so this little hacky approach worked pretty well for me.
@bernard_hymmen, not sure what you mean by
"A planar constraint with an input for an offset distance would have been exactly perfect for this. But since that doesn't seem to exist,…"
You can definitely offset mates (in the mate dialogue itself as well as by editing the mate connector themselves)…
You can also use parallel mates with limits so it seems like you made your life a lot harder than it had to be…
@eric_pesty, I'll clarify: I meant that I didn't understand the options in the planar constraint dialog (tragically misinterpreted the axes) and so put together a tedious but effective workaround to compensate for my lack of understanding. D'OH! Thanks for the jolt of reality! Much appreciated.