SolidWorks Mates Best Practice Tip #4

All of us who use assemblies in SolidWorks know that mating can be fun (in SolidWorks, of course). As a result, one can have a natural tendency to get carried away. However, there is a danger that can creep in when you mate too much in SolidWorks. You can end up creating an over-defined assembly, you can make redundant mates that will give you grief when you try to delete them or modify something. Sometimes the problem appears right away, but in the example I'm about to show you, it can remain buried until a design change causes problems to arise suddenly: