making things move

Hello all,

Normally, when I want to make cylinders and things move, I give a constraint a max and min and in it's assembly make it flexible. Then drop that assembly into my main and again make it flexible. Now sometimes, it seems that I have too many things flexible and it doesn't seem to work all that well. For instance, in it's own assemblies (in the main cylinder assembly and in the assembly I use this cylinder) they move perfectly fine. In this case, I have a SMC cylinder I got from their website. I constrained it to match their drawing and their respective dimensions, and give the moving part my max and min constraint. In the cylinder assembly, everything moves just fine. I then place that assembly into another assembly (in this case a small "L" piece of two extruded aluminum pieces put together using frame generator) and a couple plates for mounting. I then turn the cylinder's flexible setting on in the tree, and everything moves as I want it and expect it to. Here's the problem, I then place this small frame with mounting plates and cylinder into another assembly and turn on flexibility. After positioning it and getting it constrained (no, none of my constraints are constraining my movement) I can't move it.

Any thoughts? Am I using too many flexible assemblies? Too many assemblies? What are some good ways to make things move?

TIA!!

I can't tell from your description, but my guess would be level of depth of sub-assembly.

I have never had a motion sub (flexible) more than one level deep, so I have never seen this to be sure that this is the problem.

JD - But you do make things movable using this method (a constraint with a min and max)? How do you constrain things then, or rather where (as far as how deep)?

Can you zip and attach your assembly here?