Cam-Follower Mates

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A cam-follower mate is a type of tangent or coincident mate. It allows you to mate a cylinder, plane, or point to a series of tangent extruded faces, such as you would find on a cam. You can make the profile of the cam from lines, arcs, and splines, as long as they are tangent and form a closed loop.

The following picture shows three followers which stay in contact with the cam as it rotates.

To add a cam-follower mate:

  1. Click Mate on the Assembly toolbar, or click Insert, Mate.

  2. Under Advanced Mates, click Cam .

  3. Under Mate Selections, select the tangent faces on the cam for Entities to Mate .

Right-click one of the faces and click Select Tangency. This selects all the tangent faces in one step.

  1. Click in Cam follower and select a face or vertex on the cam follower.

  2. Click .

The follower is mated to all of the cam surfaces, allowing the follower to stay in contact with the cam as it rotates.

A cam-follower mate for a cam made from a set of tangent surfaces appears in the FeatureManager design tree as CamMateCoincident or CamMateTangent. A cam-follower mate for a cam made from a single surface appears as Coincident or Tangent.

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