Assembly coaxial constraint problem (solved)

[Skypilot]

New Alibre Design user here (reformed Inventor user). I am having problems with what I think should be a simple task.

I have a coil (helix) and a core. I want to constrain the coil around the core in an assembly. Normally I would expect to do this by referencing the longitudinal axes (in this case X for both) and a coaxial constraint and it would be done. However in the Assembly space, the X axis for the coil doesn't seem to be available to reference. It appears in the part sketch but doesn't carry through to the Assembly. When I invoke the Assembly Constraints dialog, I can select various parts of the two components and am presented with some constraint options, but not coaxial, and none of the presented options work. The X axis for the core is there, but not for the coil, I am unable to use those.

I feel I'm missing something fundamental but not obvious to me. I've already spent a few hours on this and searched the forum without finding a solution. Rather than going on at length and possibly confusing the description even more, I have attached the file in the hope that an experienced user will be able to see where I'm going wrong and set me straight.

Thanks,
Tom

 

[Ken226]

New Alibre Design user here (reformed Inventor user). I am having problems with what I think should be a simple task.

I have a coil (helix) and a core. I want to constrain the coil around the core in an assembly. Normally I would expect to do this by referencing the longitudinal axes (in this case X for both) and a coaxial constraint and it would be done. However in the Assembly space, the X axis for the coil doesn't seem to be available to reference. It appears in the part sketch but doesn't carry through to the Assembly. When I invoke the Assembly Constraints dialog, I can select various parts of the two components and am presented with some constraint options, but not coaxial, and none of the presented options work. The X axis for the core is there, but not for the coil, I am unable to use those.

I feel I'm missing something fundamental but not obvious to me. I've already spent a few hours on this and searched the forum without finding a solution. Rather than going on at length and possibly confusing the description even more, I have attached the file in the hope that an experienced user will be able to see where I'm going wrong and set me straight.

Thanks,
Tom

Right click on the coil and activate "show reference geometry".

If you modeled the coil using the X axis as your axis of rotation, it will now be available so you can use it for constraints.

At least, thats how I would normally do it. On your assembly, the coil's X axis was oddly, greyed out. Here I was able to expand the coil's properties/axes/planes in the design explorer, selected the coil's X axis and constrained it to the X axis of the other part.



Hopefully this helps.

 

[Skypilot]

Thank you Ken!
The axes were not showing in my Design Explorer. I was switching View\Toggle References thinking that would show them but it didn't. I did not realize that reference geometry visibility needed to be enabled through the right-click context menu on the part itself. Once I did that as you instructed, the axes were displayed in the tree and the constrain operation was done in seconds.
The devil is in the details! Thank you again.

 

[concept]

I use this feature all the time. It really comes in handy, since at times I don't need all the reference planes to be visible.