This paper addresses the issue of over-constrained assembly in mechanical designs using hole-pin patterns. When two hole-pin pairs are used, they can cause interference between components, leading to assembly failures. To mitigate this, designers often enlarge holes relative to pins to have a large float. However, when functional requirements do not permit significant float, field design engineers tend to add more assembly features, hoping them to mutually limit the float allowed by others. This numerical study employed two commercial tolerance analysis programs to demonstrate that these design changes could not sufficiently reduce float to justify added costs. Instead, this paper proposed an exactly-constrained design by replacing one of the holes with an elongated hole. Numerical analysis showed that this approach significantly reduced float compared to current design practices. This paper logically explains why this must be the case. It is hoped that this study contributes to the advancement of mechanical assembly design practices by adopting the exact constraint concep.

A spatial 3 degrees-of-freedom mechanism employing Stewart Platform structure is proposed: the mechanism maintains the 3 - RRPS structure of Stewart Platform but has an additional passive PRR serial sub-chain at the center area of the mechanism in order to constrain the output motion of the mechanism within the output motion space of the added P RR serial subchain. The forward and reverse position analyses of the mechanism are performed. Then the mechanism having both the forward and the reverse closed-form solutions is suggested and its closed form solutions are derived. It is confirmed, through the kinematic analysis of those two proposed mechanisms via kinematic isotropic index, that both the proposed mechanisms have fairly good kinematic characteristics compared to the existing spatial 3-DOF mechanisms in literature ^1.6.