By Shaun Griffiths
Sometimes, whilst constraining parts in an assembly you may find you develop errors known as sick constraints. This is where the positioning of your components based on your constraints cannot be properly resolved, as the results of some of the constraints may conflict with others.
Such errors, or sick constraints, can be seen below.
To resolve the constraints, you can try to remove the constraints and rebuild, assess them visually and try to understand the problem, or remove constraints one by one and test using trial and improvement for example.
However, you may also try the diagnose tool which you can access by right clicking on a sick constraint.
This opens the diagnose dialogue box, which allows you to test each constraint in place to assess possible resolutions. Here you can choose to view all relationships or just the conflicting ones.
From here I can now test to see if the suppression or deletion of a constraint will allow the assembly to resolve.
So, if I suppress Mate:4 and test, it will show me if this is an acceptable result. In this case it is, and I can choose to either suppress it in the model or delete it.
Thus, resulting in an assembly with no sick constraints.