Joint errors upon editing unrelated geometry

[Sam_Sanford]

Hi, 

I think I am probably making a basic mistake here since I'm still new to Fusion 360. In the file and screencast this is how I have been organizing my components in the tree and I haven't had any issues up until now. I need to be able to go back and edit component geometry without all the joints exploding on me.

Usually when I edit geometry, the joints update and if I change a feature directly tied to a joint, I just need to fix the joint to have the issue solved. But even when changing geometry that is unrelated to any joints, all of them get errors and I cannot repair them. Any ideas of what is going on here? I have to use an iterative design approach to

guess and check for optimum geometry so I don't want to continue if I am at risk of this happening when I'm much further down the design process.

I was also struggling with sharing a screencast link when creating this post so I'm inserting the link in the body here: https://autode.sk/3nSgdHn

[jhackney1972]

I have attached your Screencast to your forum question.

[jhackney1972 · Accepted solution]

I have suppressed a bunch of "Moves" that seemed to be clogging up the works.  You really do not need them, simply drag the component out into the open to apply Joints or use Isolate to make it easier to see what you are joining.  You also are a little over-zealous in the creation of components.  Note in the screen capture below you have a component created under another component, making a sub-assembly which in turns only has a sub-assembly under it.  At little unnecessary.  You are also using Pattern to copy components, this is OK as long as you remember that they are identical copies.  There is a Copy Paste/Paste New for duplicating components.  Model is attached with a different name.  I hope it will hold together better.

[Sam_Sanford · Accepted solution]

I didn't realize that "move" could muck things up like that. What I ended up doing to fix the problem on my own was I deleted all the joints and changed the sequence of events:

Originally I first created the one arm and them modeled the sandwich plate off of that arm. Then I copied the arm to have a set of four and then used the sandwich plate as a jig to joint all of the other arms in their proper orientations. I believe this might have been the issue because maybe there was some kind of circular reference?

What I did is rolled back the history to the point where I created the first arm, but before I created the sandwich plate. Then I copied the arm to make a set of four and then used a rigid joint with translations to set the arms in their proper locations, independently of the sandwich plate (which now comes after in the history). I then rolled the history back forward and re-did all the joints. Now when I change arm or sandwich plate geometry or any other thing, it all updates nicely without errors.

Thanks for the tips! I use component structure like that so that I can group things together so they collapse into one category of item in order to make the tree look cleaner and less long. Is there a better way of doing that?

I was using the pattern tool to copy components only because I saw someone else in a video do that so I just copied them. But in my case it actually helps that they are all identical because if I update the original all them them change as well which is what I want.