Does anyone else have the rather annoying problem of scissor lifts folding in on themselves when attempting to lift or compress them in Inventor? What’s a good workaround for this issue?
We’ve come across that as well in the past. I didn’t try very hard to find a solution, I just extended/compressed it very slowly.
it seems even when I do this, it still manages to compress in on itself. Since the assembly is getting complex, I have the sliding mechanism as it’s own subassembly and I move it by itself and update the rest of the assembly based on the sliding mechanism’s position, but when I do that, it updates to completely folded in. Turning on contact solver and specifying which pieces shouldn’t contact doesn’t seem to fix it either
One thing that i find helps a lot when operating with finicky parts and operations is to keep good constraints and make sure the parts are going to move in the ways they would in the real world.
Basically: Constrain all your parts properly and you can move it till your hearts content, without any visual errors occuring.
But that is the thing though. I’m putting our robot together as it would be in real life, as a mechanical simulation of a robot. Each lift stage moves regularly in it’s own subassembly, and I constrained all of the lift stages together properly, so it extends and compresses as a scissor lift would. The trouble is when I try to extend the lift, the scissor lift doesn’t recognize that each other stage is something it’s not supposed to go through, and it basically ghosts through itself making it impossible to fold back up.
I find moving the bottom leg of the scissor lift in inventor a better way to control it.
Yes, folding scissor down in inventor is annoying. Generally, at a really low position I would rather just use a constrain to see how things work.
Do you maybe have screenshots of what you are experiencing? I am finding it hard to visualize exactly what the problem is.
Or just post your file, it would help understand what you are exactly experiencing.
I think I was able to fix it. I just used a constraint on the sliding mechanism and drive the constraint whenever I need to reposition the lift. Thanks guys!