Sneak Peek SOLIDWORKS 2015: Profile Center Mate

Each year SOLIDWORKS releases a new version of its flagship product. Highly anticipated by SOLIDWORKS users, each release is packed with hundreds of new features and enhancements requested by users from around the world.

Profile Center Mate, one of the new features in SOLIDWORKS 2015 is sure to be a favorite of any user who creates Assemblies on a regular basis. The Profile Center Mate locates the centers of two items to each other regardless of their size or shape. A few options for the new mate include an offset and the ability to change the orientation in 90 degree increments. The best part about this mate is, if the size or location of the selection is changed, the Profile Center mate maintains the intelligence to keep them centered on one another!

The Profile Center Mate can also be used to fully locate round items such as screws. The mate locks two circular profiles to each other and their rotation can be locked at the same time as well. This means it only requires a single mate to fully locate a screw now. This is a huge time saver and can help to minimize the number of mates in an assembly.

To learn more about SOLIDWORKS 2015, you can click the banner below and bookmark the launch page for when it goes live on September 9th, 2014.

 

Different Mate Values for Different Configurations

Do you ever need to set up different mates vales (Distance and Angle mates) for different configurations in the Assembly.

You can download the files used from here to do this exercise/tutorial.

1. Open the Assembly the switch to configuration manager.

2. Add the configuration as required. I already have two configurations in the assembly: Closed and Open.

3. Activate the configuration named Open.

4. Expand the mates folder.

5. Double click on Angle1 mate (so that the dimension displays up in the graphics area).

6. Double click on the dimension.

7. Set the value to 120 and set the option “This Configuration“

8. Click OK to set the value and exit the dimension edit box.

9. Rebuild if required.

10 Switch to configuration manager and check both the configurations.

Similarly you can set different values for distance mate too in your assemblies.