imates not working

[Anonymous]

Please excuse the generic title. I have not used iMates much and was not sure exactly how to describe my problem.

I have an RJT union I have drawn. It consists of a Male, Liner, Nut and seal. I have assembled the parts with constraints and used infer constraints to create composite iMates for these parts. I then saved the files, deleted them and tried assembling them to prove they work correctly.

The seal can be dropped straight onto the male. The nut can be dropped straight onto the liner. When adding the liner it does not correctly pick up its position on the male.

I have tried adding an iMate between the nut and the male. This does work, but if the nut has imates to the male then the liner will not automatically attach to the nut.

I have attached my files.

Please help.

[Jon.Dean]

Take a look at the Blog posting on iMates.

Inserting components using iMates.

Jon.

[Anonymous]

Hi Jon, Thanks for the reply. I have already reviewed that blog post and I still cannot see why my imates are not working.

Regards

Kenny

[t_stramr]

Hi Kenny,

Could you attach a video showing your exact steps to reproduce the problem?

At least some pictures with incorrect result and expected result will be helpfull.

I tried to play with your dataset and was unable to reproduce the issue.

Which version of Inventor you have installed?

Thanks,

Robert

[Anonymous]

Hi Robert,

I am afraid I don't have any software installed that will screen capture and I don't have the time to make one, but my steps are fairly simple.

I insert the RJT male part.

I insert the RJT seal part with the use imates check box ticked. This snaps to the correct place on the RJT male

I insert the RJT liner part with the use imates check box ticked. It does NOT correctly snap to the male part.

I insert the RJT nut part with the use imates check box ticked. This snaps to the correct location on the liner part.

Although the imates do not work between the male and liner when inserted they can be draged together. if you select the liner, hold ALT and drag the iMate glyph from the liner to the males iMate glyph then they do snap together correctly. They just will not work during the insert.

I thought this might be a bug and something to do with the male and liner being tube and pipe components, although I havent found a solution. I know dragging the parts together is only a small extra step, but in large assemblies this can slow down productivity.

I also had Autodesk Support looking at this for a couple of weeks and they were unable to come up with a solution. They have refered it to the development team to check if it is a bug.

[t_stramr]

You don't need any special software on Windows based system.

Just press "Print Screen" on your keyboard, then open Paint program which is standard part of Windows installation and press Ctrl+V inside Paint window.

This should paste your screenshot into Paint. Save it as PNG or BMP by Paint and you are done. Inserting saved picture in your post is then question of few clicks. Your description is OK but one picture says more than 100 words.

By the way, I'm from constraint development team.

Thanks,

Robert

[Anonymous]

Hi Robert,

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.

I am well aware of how to screen capture images, but I thought you wanted a video. I have done several screen captures of the steps involved.

The second capture of each component is with the mouse hovering before clicking to place the component. The final screen shot shows how the iMates can be used to snap the parts together post-placement.

I should note that I have now published these components to a custom library so I am inserting them from the content center, but the behaviour is the same.

Regards

Kenny