Soildworks linear cam and roller follower

I don't want to waste people's time but I would appreciate some tips in the direction to go with my project.

My assembly includes a roller cam follower running along a contoured linear surface. The surface is very simple consisting of only two parallel levels 0.125 inches different in height with a single 45 degree ramp in the center to raise the follower from one level to the other. I have tried to animate this motion so that I can see its relationship with other parts of the assembly without success.

The cam animation operates correctly if I only make a tangent mate with the sloped surface (this was originally a simple ramp not a curve) but of course it does not follow the two flat surfaces. I tried to convert the cam surface to a spline and extruded the spline and the roller movement is completely erratic.

Has anyone designed an animation like this that worked correctly who can give me simple pointers on the way to proceed?

There should be a cam and follower option under advanced or mechanical mates. I have not tried it, but that is how the help guide describes its usage.

the face the round follows needs to be one face. so turn the sketch for that face into a spline, then set it up and it should work.

Thanks for the replies.

Winterfalke
Apparently the cam mate only applies to one surface, basically cam shaped, surfaces.

len_1962
That is what I tried to do with poor success. As an experiment I started off with the sections of the surface of the track surface being the lower flat, an angular straight line ramp, and the upper flat. As you would expect each of these surfaces worked individually using a tangent mate between the roller and the surface but, also as you would expect, the operation failed at the end of the section in use. I "surfed the web" and found the spline suggestion so I converted the track surface to a spline and extruded that. The tangent mate now only works intermittently and the "move along XYZ" actually lifts the roller off the surface so for some reason the tangent mate is being deactivated.

I was hoping someone else had dealt with this actual problem and that there was an "A,B,C" answer. I have spent hours trying to get the cam to work correctly. I must be doing something basic wrong. Checking the construction at all phases does not report any errors.

Is the problem in the inside corner? Does it reverse direction and dip into the lower portion of the cam at this point?. If so, increase the raduis to Greater than or equal to the cam follower. Then it should work right.

As for the spine creation draw your profile as you would normally then turn the profile in to construction lines, then just draw/overlay the spline using points along your profile as guide points, works great!


Good Luck,

Nick

Thanks Nick I will get right on this as you suggest. Your description of the problem is accurate.

Unfortunately my copy of Solidworks is old, 2005, so it does not have the later nice features and I can't justify the new package just to make a cam animation.

Brian

Beautiful Nick. It looks as though it was the radius of the curve that was causing the problem. Initially I set this to the same radius as the roller and the cam did not work. I reset the curve 25 thou. bigger than the roller and - Bingo!

Thank you,
Brian

Glad I could be of a help. It is rare that I actually have an issue with SolidWorks I can find a direct solution for... Usually involves a serious level of workaround...


Thanks,

Nick

I had a similar problem with a barrel cam a year or so ago - I never could get the mate to work so I fudged the animation and it worked OK -

Halfway down this page is a 2 minute video that has a good solidworks animation in the middle of it - start to finish was a couple of weeks of evenings and spare time on weekends. This was my first exposure to Solidworks and I am pretty happy with how it turned out and now use it regularly for modeling up machine concepts and animating them to show customers.

Turret Animation | Applied Motion Systems, Inc.

This is a great tool for helping customers to see how you plan on solving their problems.

Instead of pulling my hair out trying to get SW to do fancy stuff, I have often resorted to making an animated GIF by doing screen grabs from SW for each frame. (Had attached an example but the uploader converted it to JPG)