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Mate connector attached to assembly origin
shawn_crocker
Member, OS Professional Posts: 910 PRO
Very rarely I attach an assembly mate connector to the assemblies origin. I may do this if I want to refence a stable direction for patterning or something which isn't dependent on geometry. When I use this assembly in a parent assembly, I'm seeing this sub assembly mate connector reattach itself to the parents origin 😲. Is this intended do we think 🤔? I though at one time I had seen this but then a few years ago it seemed as though it had stopped, or possibly, I had just got used to avoiding doing this. To me, this seems pretty undesirable. When I try and mate my sub assembly in a different orientation, like rotating it 90 deg, the sub assemblies mate connector does not rotate with the assembly and stays locked to the parents origin. This wreaks havoc on anything referencing that mate connector.
Answers
Make sure you mate one or more parts in the subassembly to that assembly origin MC. Don't fix anything, otherwise that mate connector and your parts are like two independently floating elements.
Simon Gatrall | Product Development Specialist | Open For Work
OK I see. Thanks. I ended up inserting a sketch into the assembly to use as my stable reference which I normally do. The reason I am wanting to use a stable reference for some of my assembly patterns is because my sub assembly is configured. I do not want to have to introduce an elevated level of complexity into the configuration logic to account for reference part geometry being suppressed.
I often put in 3 MCs in an assembly (x, y, z directions). This simulates the missing Assembly Planes (and gives bonus 3 axes as well!). Then I mate 1 component to one of those (usually the Z one), and use the others (x, y) for linear pattern references or Z for rotary patterns. You'll see a special icon for the Mate that fixes your components to the origin - and you only need one of those. You can use the mate connectors (X, Y) for Section views too!
When this assembly is used as a sub assy in another assembly, you can be confident that it will be (internally) constrained properly - you just need to Mate the right component of your sub assy to the top-level components or a MC.
Recently I have been using a modification of @romeograham 's method by creating the three MC's in a part studio so that they are owned by a part. The owner part is mated to the assembly origin and additional instances are mated to the part MC. The MC's then travel with the part. I've been making more and more use of Assembly Mirror so it's important to have the ability to mirror in any direction. Sure would be nice if the pattern and mirror features could use any axis or plane of a single MC to minimize the visual clutter and make selection easier.
@edward_petrillo Thats a good technique. Something similar to that would be to attach your connectors to a part studio sketch. Then that part studio sketch can be brought into the assembly, fixed in space, and everything else can reference it for mating or pattern control. That sketch never needs to be suppressed in a configured assembly so it can remain the master stable source of reference. Only thing I find annoying about this is that in assemblies, you cannot right click on a sketch and select, hide all sketches, like you can with mate connectors or like you can in the part studio. As you start layering sub assemblies into a top level assembly, it can become time-consuming to race around manually hiding each and every sketch. These sketches do show up in thumbnails and I find seeing the sketches ruins the clean feeling of the assembly environment.
Shift-P will hide all the sketches.
Simon Gatrall | Product Development Specialist | Open For Work
@S1mon Thanks so much! 😄