Dynamic Clearance-Worth the Price of Admission

In Essentials class this week, one of the attendees was very impressed with the Dynamic Clearance option available when using ‘Move Component’ in an assembly.  He commented that neither he nor the few other Engineers and Designers he works with knew about this functionality.  Considering this attendees’ company designs and manufactures non-static equipment, I am somewhat surprised.

As a refresher, the Dynamic Clearance option is available when using ‘Move Component’ on the Assembly Command Manager tab.  After you select ‘Move Component’, you have several options.  As you can see from the screen capture, I have selected the male and female yoke as the two components that I’m interested in knowing the Dynamic Clearance between.  Once I have selected the components and clicked the ‘Resume Drag’ button, I select a mobile component of the assembly and start to move it.  This dimension in the graphics window represents the current minimum clearance between the components I selected.  Also, you should note that in the Property Manager window, the dialog at the bottom of Dynamic Clearance provides an indication of the minimum clearance between the components, shown as [min = 0.079], as soon as you start to drag/move components.  Then all you have to do is watch your on-screen feedback to move the components to that closest position.

Now that you’ve added a new tool to your arsenal, take a look at some of your movable assemblies and see if you have less clearance between components than you thought.  As another Essentials attendee commented, not all of our minimum clearance conditions occur in our orthogonal views!  For him, the Dynamic Clearance functionality was “worth the price of admission”.   I hope the rest of the class was, too!