SolidWorks Mates Series: Slot Mate

Overview of the Slot Mate in SolidWorks. We'll go over how to create a slot mate and the four different options you have to constrain the mate.

Video Transcript:

Hey Everyone,
Today we’re going to give a brief overview of the Slot mate in SolidWorks.

The Slot Mate allows you to mate a cylindrical object, such as a hole or a bolt to a straight or arced slot.
You can also use it to mate two slots together.
Here we have our robot arm that we’ve used in a few examples in the past.
We want to mate the wrist component to the forearm so that it’s range is limited to the slot in the carbon fiber plate.
We will use the thru hole on the wrist and the Slot on the forearm plate for the mate.
To create the mate, select the mates Icon, expand the Mechanical Mates menu, and select “Slot”.
For the mate selections, we will select the thru hole on the wrist and one of the slot faces.
We’ll leave the constraint to free for now.
And hit the green check.
Now you see that the wrist components range of motion is limited to the range of the slot, but can still be dragged freely.
The Slot Mate has four constraint options, Free, Center in Slot, Distance Along Slot and Percent Along Slot.
The Free option allows the component to be moved freely within the confines of the slot.
The Center in Slot option centers the component inside the slot.
The Distance Along Slot option places the component a set distance from the slot end.
You can change which end of the slot that the distance is measured from by selecting flip dimension
And the Percent Along Slot option fixes the component a set percentage of the slot length from an end face.
Again you can flip the side the dimension is measured from by hitting the flip dimension checkbox.
This has been a back overview of the Slot Mate in SolidWorks.
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