As I am designing my next iteration of my robot in Inventor, I am trying to decide whether or not to CAD in things like screws and nuts into my build. For those who have done it, would you recommend it?
Thanks.
It’s handy to have some indication of where you intend to fix things. The simplest thing you can do is loft a surface between the edges of the outer holes. If you’ve got history running, you’ll see that stretch when you move something if you’ve got things in the right order, and if you haven’t, there’ll at least be a dangling thing reminding you to arrange for it to hold together. You need to include screw heads and nuts where space is tight. And if you don’t trim screws, extend the loft to a standard screw length.
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I used to not put them in, but as I started CADding things with tighter and tighter tolerances, I started using them in order to be sure I had enough clearance for them.
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And take advantage of the opportunity to have multiple versions of the robot superposed in the same CAD file. Very abstract to weigh up where centres of gravity need to be all the way down to grinding into a standoff.
An important note is that you can usually tell when something is going to have very tight tolerances; when that happens its useful to do screws, spacers, and nuts. If you need to simply screw 2 c-channels together then I don’t usually do anything to special.
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