Mates: The Wild Kingdom of SolidWorks

You don’t have to be Marlin Perkins of Wild Kingdom to appreciate the number of ways to pair parts together using “Mates” in SolidWorks. However, if we take a page or two from Darwin, we might make sense of the classifications of mates in SolidWorks. Let’s think of how Darwin classified the kingdom of plants and animals. Take a look at the image on the left, showing the classification system that the Wild Kingdom uses. Let’s Presume that the Kingdom we are dealing with is the “Mating” Kingdom. Beneath that in the hierarchy is the Phylum. SolidWorks mates are broken down into two Phylums, the Geometric Phylum and the Horizontal Phylum. The Geometric classes of mates are as follows: Basic, Advanced and Mechanical. The other Phylum is the “Horizontal”, which deals in the realm of mating to sketches, planes, ect… In this blog article, I would like to focus on the “Horizontal” phylum and it’s two classes of mates. These two classes are dubbed as the Layout class and the Delphi class.

The layout sketching technique is quite powerful, especially for larger designs and machinery. Take a look at the engine image below. You can see how one could design a quick mechanism in 2D, with all the mechanism dynamics of the alternator bracket, positions of belt tensioners, ect… Each of these components would be “block” entities in a single layout sketch in assembly mode. Once the components work to you satisfaction, you can drop in the 3D components if they all ready exist and mate them to the layout sketch. This approach is also great for program managers who want to retain control over the position of components and assign ownership of subsystems of components to project engineers using SolidWorks Enterprise PDM.

The other class in the Horizontal phylum of mates is the Delphi class. I did not make this up. This is been a technique that has been around for quite some time in the world of CAD. Long before SolidWorks and their new-fangled geometric, associative mates, the Delphi technique allows engineering teams to mates systems of components to datum planes that are strategically places. Much like the compartments of a submarine, components are mated to sketching planes are various stations., as in the image below.

This technique actually holds a patent, filed under US Patent 7472044, in which the patent abstract states: Abstract
A method for converting a vertically structured CAD/CAM model to a horizontally structured CAD/CAM model, comprising: identifying and establishing a base feature; establishing a parent coordinate system; identifying a parent modeling element; identifying each dependency for each feature from the parent modeling element; restructuring each dependency for each feature for placement, such that each feature exhibits a direct associative relationship with a reference feature; and restructuring each dependency for each feature for positioning, such that each feature exhibits a direct associative relationship with another reference feature.