Well, apologies in advance if this is stupid--it seems stupid, so I wanted some feedback.
I am dealing with a truss structure with many hundreds of parts and many hundreds of mates. It is wildly over-constrained, partly because I am playing a hand I was dealt, and didn't build this from the ground up. So all of the mates will solve, but because they are over-constrained they tend to break once in awhile when SW gets confused and needs some hand holding to get it together--my fault, not SW's.
So my solution was to suppress every mate, fix everything, work for awhile, then unsuppress the mates, rebuild, suppress, wash, rinse repeat. This is working very well, I have total control over my assembly. I was pretty happy with it.
But it's not even necessary to do that. I can just fix all of the constrained parts without suppressing anything. Mates turn grey, SW never trys to solve anything, and I have total control and never never see an hourglass. But! If I make a change that seems to break a mate, SW sees it and warns me. I float the broken parts, they solve instantly (if possible, if not I repair the damage), I fix them again, wash, rinse, repeat. Every once in awhile, just to be sure, I float everything, surf the forum while it solves, then fix everything again.
Is this stupid? Is this something that everybody else is already doing, or that Vargatu already said I should be doing and I forgot?
SolidworksAssemblies