The CAD forum is not very active but I’m going to try and get this thread going as it’s the CAD season again with (hopefully) lots of new designs underway. I’ve learnt just enough about Autodesk Inventor to have realized that I need to be changing the way I do certain things to improve productivity. The first thing I wanted to tackle was adding bearing flats, screws and nuts to a design as this has been taking far too much time.
So here are my first ideas.
- Modify some parts to use iMates. These are a quicker way of adding hints about constraints to a component. For example, to constrain a screw into a hole, a normal procedure may be to open the constraints window, select insert, select the screw axis near it’s head, then select the axis of the hole into which to place it. If an iMate has been placed onto the screw then to make the constraint the iMate glyph is selected and alt dragged onto the axis of the hole, much quicker.
Here is how to add the iMate.
Open a part, select iMate from the manage menu on the ribbon. A dialog like the constraint dialog will be shown, in this example select insert and then the circle as shown below.
[ATTACH]6277[/ATTACH]
Save the part (or a copy)
In a new assembly place the part. When the part is selected the iMate glyphs will be shown, we only have one here, it’s the white blob.
ALT click and drag the glyph and drag onto the desired hole.
[ATTACH]6280[/ATTACH]
Done.
[ATTACH]6283[/ATTACH]
There is lots more that can be done with iMates. For example, if the iMates have names then Inventor will try and match the iMate names between two parts when ALT dragging one onto another.
In part two I will create a bearing block assembly with two screws and two lock nuts along with iMates ready to be placed onto a structural piece.