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Alt+dragging a SmartMate

Probably the easiest way to create a SmartMate quickly is by Alt+dragging. One, two, or even three mates can be applied at once by holding down the Alt key while dragging a face or edge from one part onto a face or edge on another part.

When you are dragging a part while pressing the Alt key, the part is made transparent to enable you to see other part faces that you may want to mate it to. A special cursor appears when a SmartMate is about to be applied. Figure 5.5 shows the cursors that appear for adding Concentric and Coincident mates.

FIGURE 5.5

Applying a SmartMate

When you drop the face or edge onto the mating face or edge to complete the mate, you must use the popup Mate toolbar to accept or alter the mate. In the examples in Figure 5.6, a face is being dragged onto another face. However, you can also drag edges and vertices. Mates are limited to being either Coincident or Concentric.

The peg-in-hole mate is actually the combination of a Concentric mate and a Coincident mate. This is the type of mate that is created between a screw and a hole, and is the result of Alt+dragging a circular edge onto a circular edge. When the circular edges are created by the intersection of a cylindrical face and a flat face, the Concentric mate goes between the two cylindrical faces, and the Coincident mate goes between the flat faces. The peg-in-hole mate is illustrated in Figure 5.6. The top two images show the state of the parts before the SmartMate. The image in the lower left shows the SmartMate orienting the part in the wrong way so that the two parts interfere. In the image in the lower right, the part to which the SmartMate is applied has been reoriented by the Tab being pressed before the SmartMate is accepted by the part being dropped.

FIGURE 5.6

Using the SmartMate to create the peg-in-hole mate combination

Tip

You can press the Tab key to flip the alignment if a SmartMate tries to put parts together in the wrong way. If you are in the process of Alt+dragging, make sure to release the Alt key before pressing Tab. The Alt+Tab combination is a Windows shortcut to show a list of open applications.

You can also Alt+drag a SmartMate to mate origins and coordinate systems. When you Alt+drag one origin onto another, you get the special cursor shown to the left, and when you release the mouse button, the popup option box shown in Figure 5.7 appears. If you only want the origin points mated Coincident, turn off the Align Axes option. With the Align Axes option on, the origin points will be Coincident and the X, Y, and Z directions will be parallel to the same directions in the counterpart origin.

FIGURE 5.7

Using the Align Axes option on the popup option box for origin-to-origin SmartMates

Dragging between windows

You can simply Ctrl+drag a face of the part to the face of another part in a different SolidWorks window. It is probably most useful to tile windows before creating this kind of SmartMate.

Using Mate references

Mate references are model faces, edges, or vertices that are pre-selected and used in a SmartMate-like fashion when you drag a part in from Windows Explorer or from a library window. Mate references are discussed in Chapter 15 in the course of discussing library parts. They are a great way to automate common mates with commonly used parts, such as library parts.

Mating with macros

If not all the confirmations and extra mouse-clicks to open and close windows are for you, and you are just applying simple mates, then you may want to use macros to mate parts. Macros are not going to give you the same flexibility, but for simple and predictable mates, they greatly increase your speed. You have to have the parts ready to go when you press the macro button, or you will create the wrong mate.

You can find macros for coincident, concentric, parallel, perpendicular, and tangent mates in the DVD folder for Chapter 5. For example, to use the concentric macro, you need to pre-position the parts