assembling an assembly

[mickingaamco]

I have a design I am working on. Please see the screen shot below. The lower assembly (Bellcrank Weldment) consists of three pieces. Each end piece is jointed to the center cylinder with a fixed joint. I want to assemble the weldment to the center part just above it. When I put the parts together with a revolute joint, only that center cylinder rotates. Actually, you can't tell that the cylinder is rotating, but the flag is rotatng. The end pieces do not rotate. Am I missing something?

[fulcrumusa]

There are two things that I want to check:

1. When you say "only the flag is rotating" do you mean while you are previewing the joint or even after you click "OK"? The preview process only shows a preview of the joint between the two specific components. It ignores all other defined joints. So, seeing only the cylinder rotate is normal.

2. For joints to work correctly, one of the two parts needs to be grounded. This give Fusion360 a base reference onto which to build the joint motion. Just like in the real world one part of a joint is fixed relative to the other.

[fulcrumusa]

I just saw that one of your components is ground. Please, ignore that part of my post.

[mickingaamco]

Thanks for trying, but I already grounded the center part (which you did notice). The flag rotates first when the revolute joint is created, and later when you animate the joint or animate the model, the same thing happens: The outer arms don't move. If I try to grab the arms with the cursor to rotate them, the whole assembly moves, but no rotation.

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@fulcrumusa wrote:

I just saw that one of your components is ground. Please, ignore that part of my post.

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[TrippyLighting]

When creating the joint, what you see moving is just a preview to indicate how the joint will behave. THis does not simulate the entire assembled design as this could be very computing resource intensive.

You have to complete the joining process to see whether the joint works in the context of the comlete assembly.

If you still have problems with this design, perhaps export your design as a .f3d file and attach it to your next post.