How to lock the rotation of fasteners

About the lock rotation feature

SOLIDWORKS lets you lock the rotation of a concentric mate. This is especially useful for parts where the rotation does not matter, but you don’t want to see the underdefined minus (-) sign before an assembly component.

For standard Toolbox components, SOLIDWORKS can automatically lock the rotation for you. Just enable this setting:

Unfortunately, this setting only works for parts and assemblies that are marked with the Toolbox icon. So we extended it.

Lightning can lock all your fasteners

Lightning is built for fasteners. So we found a way to lock the rotation of all concentric mates, whether your parts are Toolbox parts or not.

To enable this behavior, you only need to enable the lock rotation setting above. Lightning does not have its own setting; we use the SOLIDWORKS setting.

Once you enable this setting, we will lock the rotation of all concentric mates for parts you add with Lightning.

Change the Toolbox icon in your fasteners

By default, SOLIDWORKS parts from the Toolbox are marked with the Toolbox icon .

To add or remove this icon, you can use a special tool, already built into Lightning. See Change the Toolbox flag in your models.