Other Things to Try
• You may wish to try some other parameter definitions for this part. How would you define parameters so that the width of the slots controls the radius of the hole?
• Another interesting feature of this example is the way in which the small boltholes are constrained. If you assign a new diameter to one hole, the rest will resize when you solve. Why? Examine the constraints on these holes to find out.
• Start again at the beginning of this example. After using Complete, try modifying the position of the uppermost pair of boltholes (the pair whose y-position is specified by the dimension 175.86). Modify this to be 240. The x-position dimension (110) moves to be above the dimension 60. Use Distance constraints on the dimension texts to keep them in the same relative positions.
• Normally either the top horizontal dimension of 1000 or the bottom horizontal dimension of 500 will be extracted by the automatic constraint generator. What if you wanted to be able to control both dimensions independently? This would imply that the two vertical sides of the part need not remain vertical. How would you constrain the part to allow this to happen?
This is a very simple example of a very common situation. The default part contains obvious constraints that are unintended in general. Even in this simple example, the number of unintended constraints that the automatic constraint generator could extract is large (side lines are parallel, each side line is perpendicular to the top and bottom lines, each side line is parallel and perpendicular to some of the lines in the internal cutout and to some of the construction lines, etc).
There are three general strategies for this situation. Try each one.
◦ Use Complete and then Ban those unintended constraints. Continue this process until the goal has been reached.
◦ Manually constrain the side elements so that Complete doesn't need to add any constraints.
◦ Use Modify Stretch to change the default part into one that is more general.
Which is easiest?