- [Instructor] Once you've gotten pretty far
in a design in SolidWorks for a large assembly,
it's a good idea to start locking down your assembly
if you don't need to utilize all the mates
and relationships that you have in place
because then SolidWorks is just going to have to
go ahead and rebuild them every time
it goes to the feature tree.
So I've started with a simple assembly here,
just a universal joint.
If you've been using SolidWorks for awhile,
you've probably seen this example before in the tutorials.
But essentially, it's a universal joint that rotates.
But you can see, as I rotate it around and around,
it wants to rebuild here, and it has active mates
that need to be calculated to do this motion.
So as I'm moving, I'm actually putting a load onto my CPU
in the performance of my system.
So I know that everything works here.
There's no collisions. It goes around and around no problem.
So what I'm going to do is actually just start
locking things down so.
I'm first going to go control Q
to rebuild my entire assembly and hit save.
I'm then going to select all the other components,
hold down my shift key to select them all,
right-click, and here you just select fix.
Now everything's fixed in place.
You can see that if I grab this wheel and try to drag it,
the selected component is fixed and it cannot be moved,
which is fine.
I've done all the work on all these designs.
I don't need it to do anymore motion.
And if I do a drop-down in my mates area,
you can see all the mates are now suppressed.
Now if I want to look at a specific part of it,
let's say this handle for example,
I want to be able to make that loose.
I can simply hit flow and then this part will become loose.
But because it has mates with other components,
it won't be able to move.
So for example if I suppressed this mate,
the parallel mate, I can rotate it now.
I can also unsuppress that and it's locked back into place.
And depending on your assembly,
this is going to change drastically from one end to another.
You might want to fix just certain sub-assemblies,
certain components, but when you can utilize the fix,
do that because it'll also help
when you accidentally drag a component
that it doesn't pop another component
off into the middle of the space
and then you're playing this game where
you're trying to zoom in and out
and file your components and push them back in.
These are all going to help increase
the performance of your machine
because it's not calculating any mates
and help you limit your frustrations because
you're not trying to fix an assembly
that exploded all over your screen.
So, definitely use the fix where you can,
and you can also float it and
fix it in different configurations as well.
So for example, if I float all of these,
and let's add a new configuration let's say.
We have the test configuration.
If I go back and try to fix a part,
it's going to ask me if I want to fix it
in this configuration or in all configurations.
So if you want to make a specific configuration
that has everything fixed or everything flexible,
you can do that as well and switch back and forth.