SolidWorks has great technology to put parts together called mates. In my previous article about the Wild Kingdom of mates I indicated there are various “phylums” of mates. This topic will hone in on the Geometric Phylum of mates and specifically on the “Width” mate.
The Width mate saves a lot of time for engineers who are putting parts together that are not line to line fits, which constitutes the majority of mechanical fits. Prior to the width mate, an engineer would have to break out the calculator and add the distance between all the faces up and divide by two and use a distance mate. Or if the models were built with planes down the middle of the part, then the engineer could drill into the feature tree of the part and mate the parts to one another using planes(not too bad…) The width mate allows a user to pick to 2 faces on each part and SolidWorks will do all the math to center the two parts based on the selected faces.
I discovered something of a shortcut today relating to the width mate. As in the image above, you can pick 2 faces on one part and a face that is adjacent to those first selections in the second part and the width mate still works! Jason Pancoast, the Engineering Manager here at CAPINC indicated some reasoning as to why this works. It is because it is a cylindrical face I am selecting. The Width Mate also works with V-shaped gaps & tabs. To quote Mel Allen: How about that! (see youtube link)
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