A cam-follower mate is a type of tangent or coincident mate. It allows you to mate a cylinder, plane, or point to a series of tangent extruded faces, such as you would find on a cam. You can make the profile of the cam from lines, arcs, and splines, as long as they are tangent and form a closed loop.
The following picture shows three followers which stay in contact with the cam as it rotates.
Video: Cam-Follower Mate
Before adding a cam-follower mate:
- Create a cam part:
- Create a profile of tangent lines, arcs, and splines. The profile must form a closed loop.
- Extrude the profile.
- Create a follower part. The portion to be mated must be one of the following:
- Cylindrical face
- Planar face
- Vertex
- Insert the cam and follower into an assembly and add mates to prevent motion that is extraneous to the intended motion between the cam and follower. For example, constrain the cam to rotate about its axis.
You can investigate cam-follower motion in a layout sketch before creating the models. See
Make Path.
To add a cam-follower mate:
- Click Mate
(Assembly toolbar) or .
- In the PropertyManager, under Mechanical Mates, click Cam
.
- Under Mate Selections, select the tangent faces on the cam for Entities to Mate
.
Right-click one of the faces and click Select Tangency. This selects all the tangent faces in one step.
- Click in Cam follower and select a face or vertex on the cam follower.
- Click
.
The follower is mated to all of the cam surfaces, allowing the follower to stay in contact with the cam as it rotates. A cam-follower mate appears in the FeatureManager design tree as 
CamMateCoincident or CamMateTangent.