Autodesk Inventor: Assembly techniques for woodworkers, The Multi-Body Master Part Technique.

This is the last post in my series on Autodesk Inventor Assembly modelling techniques for Woodworkers. I have written this tutorial to demonstrate the ‘Multi Body master Part’ Technique of building Assembly models with Autodesk Inventor.

The method of using a Multi-body model and Inventor’s ‘Make Components’ tool is pretty easy – but the feature modelling in this tutorial is a little more fiddly. If you are new to Inventor I recommend that you try my previous tutorials, Modelling a bench hook (Bottom up technique), Modelling a shooting board (Top down technique), and Modelling a Mitre block (Skeletal modelling) first.

Each tutorial is based on an item every woodworker will have in their shop. I have based this tutorial on a Saw Horse.

This tutorial will show you how to create a simple assembly model with Autodesk Inventor, using the ‘Top Down’ or ‘Multi-body Master Part’ modelling technique.

We will start with a Master part file which contains multiple bodies which represent all the major parts needed for our assembly. We will then use Autodesk Inventor’s new ‘Make components’ tool to ‘Derive’ our master solids out into our part files and create our assembly model.

Using this method there is no need to add assembly constraints to lock the position of the parts, all parts will automatically be grounded using their origin coordinates. The Master part file will control the size and layout of the assembly.

This article is aimed at novice users. However I am assuming that you are familiar with the concepts of parametric modelling, that you are comfortable creating and constraining sketches, and that you’ve had some time to explore the Inventor user interface.

In this tutorial we will use the following workflow:

• Create a part file
• Add parameters
• Add work features
• Create a sketch
• Constrain the sketch
• Create a sketch based feature (a Solid)
• Use the ‘Make components tool to build our parts and assembly.

Bonus – you can now watch these tutorials on Video as part of Autodesk University Virtual 2012 (may require a free login). Here’s the link:

http://au.autodesk.com/au-online/classes-on-demand/class-catalog/2012/autodesk-inventor-products/drive-autodesk-inventor-with-the-top-down-alternative-assembly-modeling-techniques-master-class

Download “Saw Horse” SawHorse.zip – Downloaded 3215 times – 2 MB