Continue to Site

Welcome to MCAD Central

Join our MCAD Central community forums, the largest resource for MCAD (Mechanical Computer-Aided Design) professionals, including files, forums, jobs, articles, calendar, and more.

moving components in assembly

shiftersteve

New member
Hi, another new to Solidworks user here- having difficulty placing components in an assembly where they are positioned in a particular place... For example, lets say I want to placethe center of acylinder offset 6 inches from the exact center of a the front face of a cube? I've been messing with the filters, the move command, the place constraint command etc. I dont really want to constrain the relationship of the two parts just yet,as I need to model a part between them and dont really know what that part will be just yet. Coming from 12 years of different software, it would SEEM that I could just "snap" the center of the cylinder and do a delta move to the exact position I want relative to an edge on the cube. The online tutorials dont do much for assembly modeling. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.


Steve F
 
I am new to SolidWorks, too, and not very qualified to answer, but have you tried applying a distance mate? If you don't want to constrain it, maybe you can set the distance mate, and it will move there, then delete the mate afterwards. Just a wild guess, but you said ANY help. Good luck!
 
If you just want to position the part and not add any mates, go ahead and use the mate tool to position the part but check the box at the bottom labeled "use for positioning only". This will move the part as you apply the mates, but does not add the mates into the feature tree.
 
timelord is correct, and if youneed further guides open up the sketch of the individual assembly part,pick the most relevant plane to what you are doing, and use some centerlines to define space on the planes and you will be able to use them during your assembly.
Edited by: skateboardkid
 

Sponsor

Articles From 3DCAD World

Back
Top