Part III: Working with Assemblies
Drag 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.Mate references
Mate references are model faces, edges, or vertices that are pre-selected and used in a SmartMate-
like fashion when a part is dragged in from Windows Explorer or from a library window. Mate
references are discussed in Chapter 19 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 all the confirmations and extra mouse-clicks to open and close windows are not 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 do vastly improve
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
CD-ROM folder for Chapter 13. For example, to use the concentric macro, you would need to
pre-position the parts so that they are within 90 degrees of the proper alignment, have one of the
parts mated in place such that that only one part will move, select the two cylindrical faces, and
then run the macro. Ideally, the macro would be connected to a hotkey, so the workflow for this
process would be extraordinarily fast. You would click one face, click the other face, then press the
hotkey, and the parts would fly together.Note
To connect a macro to a hotkey, first put the macro in a folder called macros under the SolidWorks installation
directory, and then restart SolidWorks. Then use the Keyboard dialog box (Tools ➪ Customize ➪ Keyboard) to
assign hotkeys to the macros in the list. n
Like SmartMates, macros work best for the simpler mate types where you do not need to select any
options. The workflow with macros can be very fast, but you have to have the parts pre-positioned
and be very sure of what you want.Mating for Motion
Dynamic Assembly Motion is a powerful tool for visualizing the motion of mechanisms in
SolidWorks. It works best if there is a single open degree of freedom.