From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2018 Essential Training

Magnetic mates - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2018 Essential Training

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Magnetic mates

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- [Instructor] Magnetic Mates are a really great thing that's been added to Solid Works, in Solid Works 2017. In Solid Works 2018, these Magnetic Mates are still there, and they're even easier to use now, The first thing you need to do before you can use Magnetic Mates, though, is to establish the actual connection points and the ground plan for each one of those components, and we're going to be getting into that in the next movie, but for right now, let me show you how to use Magnetic Mates. Now, whenever you have a component that has a Magnetic Mate connection, all you need to do is just drag that component, like this one over here, close to some other connector, and notice you get this little purple or pink line that connects the two pieces together, go ahead and let go and those two components will just slide together. Same thing over here, if you want to grab a component, like this one over here, drag it over close to somebody else, let go, it's going to slide over to the next instance it sees, or the next little connection it can find. So, over here, I can grab this component over here, get it close over here, or bring it over here, and connect it over here. Basically, anyone of those little dots, you get it close to, it is going to automatically going to want to go over there and start creating that connection. As soon as you do, place at one of these places, it'll automatically slide together, and create the mates for you. Down here, under the mates, you can see here these are all the Magnetic Mates that have been added. You notice that we've got these coincident mates which is locking that down to the ground plane. And, then here are the individual Magnetic Mates. Of course, you can delete those if you want to, or you can continue adding on to this. Now, if you have a part that has multiple configurations, like these do over here, you can easily click on a component, and then switch to a different style of configuration. So, in this case here, let's go ahead and change that to a 90. The part automatically updates to the 90 configuration, and all the magnetic mates automatically still apply, and it automatically adjusts to whatever it needs to do to keep that active. Alright, so this is one great example. And, this is basically like a little railroad track for a toy. You can also play with a few of the other components that I placed into the exercise files folder. I don't have them all open here, but you might want to bring those in, and you can play with some Magnetic Mates, using some of those assets that I provided for you. I do want to show you one other example of this. And, this is a piping example, so I'm going to jump over here to the pipes assembly I have opened up, and that is in the PVC folder, inside of the same exercise folder for this movie. Alright, in this case here, I've got a couple different simple pieces of PVC pipe, and I've go this little connector down here, right angle connector at this point. Now, I can hold down control and drag out a brand new connector, if you want to, and then just bring that Magnetic Mate right over close to somebody else, let go, and they just snap together. Pretty handy, right. Go over here, click on control, drag out another piece of pipe, now you can click on that pipe, itself. If you had multiple configurations, you could switch to a different configuration, if you wanted to. Or, you can click on a part like this, hold down control, bring that one out, of course. Now you have the Magnetic Mate. if you hold down control, you can snap that out, here. Let's try it one more time, there it is. Bring that over here, snap it together, bring in a pipe, over here, snap that together, bring this piece over here, of course, snap it together. So, you can very quickly generate very cool assemblies, in a very robust manner, in a very easily changeable manner, as well. Especially if you had different configurations of the same type of component, and you can just literally drag and drop them to create your assembly. So, the Magnetic Mates, really are such a great addition to Solid Works. And, once you get them set up, they're very straight forward and easy to use.

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