Autodesk Inventor, Assembly techniques for woodworkers: The Skeletal Modelling technique.

This is my fourth post in my series on ‘Assembly Techniques for Woodworkers’. You might also like to read about the ‘Bottom up Technique’ and the ‘Top Down technique’.

I have base these tutorials on simple items that you would find in any Woodworkers shop – this time it’s a Mitre Block.

This tutorial will show you how to create a simple assembly model with Autodesk Inventor, using the ‘Skeletal’ modelling technique.

Using skeletal modelling, we will start with a master part file which contains a master sketch which defines all the major geometry needed for our assembly. We will then ‘Derive’ our master sketch out into our part files. We will then build the features in each part as usual. Finally we will bring all the parts back into our assembly model.

Using this method there is no need to add assembly constraints to lock the position of the parts, all parts can be grounded using their origin coordinates. The master part 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
• Create a sketch
• Constrain the sketch
• Create a new part file
• Derive the master sketch into the current part
• Add a sketch based feature (an extrusion)
• Change the look of a part
• Create the next part
• Add all the parts to the assembly
• ‘Ground a root’ the parts into position

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 “Mitre Block” MitreBlock.zip – Downloaded 2329 times – 2 MB