- When you're mating components together
inside of SolidWorks,
there is a hierarchy,
and the more powerful of an object
you choose to mate together,
the more powerful your mate will be between the objects.
Now, in this part here,
notice there are no flat faces on the sides.
There's one here at the bottom.
So if I were to mate,
like the bottom here to this part over here,
that would work pretty good,
but I don't really have any other way to align this part,
except the planes that are fundamentally there.
So right over here in that part, if I click on the part,
you can see I've got my front plane,
I've got the top plane and I've got the right plane.
So instead of choosing the bottom face,
I could actually choose the top plane.
Now, what's really amazing and powerful about that
is if I completely delete the part
or completely modify the part,
that fundamental plane, the top plane will still be there.
That right plane, that top plane, the front plane,
all those things are fundamentally there
before we created anything else.
So if you use those fundamental planes
to mate components together,
you've created the strongest mate possible.
If you use a point, it's very easy to delete that point.
If you add a radius, or a filler or something like that,
or just modify the part,
if that point goes away, guess what?
That mate also goes away.
Same thing with a line. A line is easy to get rid of.
It's more powerful than a point,
but a line's also easy to get rid of.
A plane or a face of a part is a little bit more powerful,
but still nowhere close as powerful
as one of the fundamental planes.
So in this video, I want to teach you about
using those fundamental planes to make components together.
So, looking at this part over here,
let's go ahead and take a look at what fundamental planes
are in there.
So I've got the front plane,
I've got the top plane and I've got the right plane.
Alright, so what I can do here
is I can click on "Mate",
and I can go ahead and choose the top surface here,
which is not as powerful as the plane.
But, over here on the part itself,
that I want to mate together,
I can come down here
and I can say, Hey, this top plane,
I can mate those two things together.
Click on the green check-mark.
And there you have it.
Alright.
The next thing I want to do is I want to choose those planes.
Now notice how I went through
and looked for the planes over here
and kind of highlighted them.
The other thing I can do is come over here
to the View or Visibility window
and I can choose to "Show Planes".
So if I turn on the planes here, I can see them
and then,
I can easily grab those planes for mating.
And if you don't see those planes,
you can always come over here
and make sure that you click on it
with a left mouse-click
and make sure you're showing or hiding it.
So make sure you're showing the ones you want to use.
And sometimes you want to hide the ones
that are not going to be applicable to what we're doing.
So come up here to mate.
I'm going to choose this plane here to that plane there.
They slide together, looks good.
And this plane right over here,
notice as I highlight over it, it just highlights.
And, I can choose that plane.
There it is.
And just that easily,
I was able to mate those components together.
When you're done looking at those planes,
just go ahead and turn them off right over here.
And now I have almost an unbreakable mate.
The only mate I could screw up here
would be the top surface here,
because I could delete that top surface
or I could do something to it.
But everything else is super solid,
because it is using those planes that we can't destroy.
So if you do decide to mate components together,
try to choose the most powerful entities you can to mate.
The best are the planes, because they're always there.
And it's also the easiest for SolidWorks to figure out
because it's not based upon any geometry
that's actually in the model.
It's just that fundamental plane.
The worst is a point.
The second worst is a line.
Third worst is a face.
And then, planes are much better than that.
Of course, the fundamental planes are the absolute best.
So definitely try that out
when you're working on your next assembly model.