Constraints of Suppressed Part Vanish when changes are made to Assembly

[Anonymous]

We are using Autodesk Inventor 2016 and are currently having an issue with mates that are attached to an adaptive part disappearing when the adaptive part is suppressed and something is changed in the assembly.

I have attached some screenshots of a simplified example of what we are trying to do below to better illustrate the issue, in the first one I have placed 2 instances of the same part into an assembly these parts have work points as part of the part file. The first part is grounded the second is constrained to it.

Next I create a part in the assembly, then created a 3D sketch in that part using the work points from the other 2 part files.

Once this part is created I can move the blocks and the sketch remains attached to them.

I can suppress and unsuppress Part3 and nothing happens. But if I suppress it and then move the blocks, the mates attaching Part 3 to the other parts in the assembly just vanish, and do not return when I unsuppress it (Notice Mates 3 & 4 are gone in the picture below). They vanish as soon as I hit enter on changing the Flush 2 constraint from 5" to 3".  

I don't receive a warning or error message that this has happened they just vanish. This same thing will also happen if Part 3 is suppressed and I create another part file in the assembly, even if the created part file is empty. Does anyone have a suggestion of how to stop this from happening or have a better way to accomplish this? The idea is to use the 3D sketched line for sweep.

Thanks.

[kennyj]

Hello sresmer,

I think this is expected behavior.  Once you suppress a part, Inventor treats it as if it isn't there.  You may want to play with Grounding the parts or using visibility settings instead of suppressing.

As for the build, I would suggest using skeletal modeling for the assembly.  Create each part based upon the skeleton (include the 3D sketch in the skeleton).  Then when you Ground and Root each part, their constraints are driven by the skeleton and not by assembly constraints.

This will allow you to suppress all the parts and have them retain their positions.

Hope this helps,

Kenny