About Mates

Mates create geometric relationships between assembly components. As you add mates, you define the allowable directions of linear or rotational motion of the components relative to each other.

You can move a component within its degrees of freedom, visualizing the assembly's behavior.

Some examples include:

  • A coincident mate forces two planar faces to become coplanar. The faces can move along one another, but cannot be pulled apart.
  • A concentric mate forces two cylindrical faces to become concentric. The faces can move along the common axis, but cannot be moved away from this axis.

Mates are solved together as a system. The order in which you add mates does not matter; all mates are solved at the same time. You can suppress mates just as you can suppress features.