Design Errors and Mating
Sometimes the geometry in or between your components appears to be accurate,
but is slightly wrong. For example, you can have the following situations:
Two components that look parallel, but are positioned
to be slightly diverging.
An imported block that appears to have orthogonal
sides, but the angle between two faces is actually 90.1 degrees.
Two components that appear to be the same height,
but are slightly different.
Bolt holes in two components that should be the
same distance apart, however one component was made using rounded metric
units, and one using rounded English units.
These design errors (and others) can sometimes lead to mating errors.
Example
Suppose your intention is to align these two blocks so that they are
coincident on one side and one end as shown. Your visual inspection makes
you believe the blocks are each orthogonal.
You first add a coincident mate between the sides:
Then add a coincident mate between the ends:
The blocks do not move into the mate and a mating error appears in the
FeatureManager design tree.
How MateXpert helps
When you click on the problem mate in MateXpert, a message appears
which tells you that the faces in the mate are not parallel, and lists
the angle between the faces.
How you can fix the problem
Change the geometry of one of the blocks so that the faces are parallel.
Because your intention was for both blocks to be orthogonal, examine the
blocks for the cause of the non-orthogonal geometry. In this case, the
sketch for the base extrusion of one of the blocks was not a rectangle.
You do not have to delete the problem mate. After you correct the geometry
in your parts, the mate will be satisfied.
You can also use mate
callouts and View
Mate Errors to help identify and resolve mating problems.
Related Topics
Conflicting
Mates
Mates
to Dangling Geometry
Mating
Conflicts to Avoid