Hey gang, long time to Inventor trickery eh? Well, I just got off a 6 week travel stint and was busy bringing Inventor to the masses. I also get to see my fair share of mechanical Americana too. Like this radial engine I peeped at the airport in Knoxville, TN. I love it when engineering gets the same respect as art that is based on emotion, childhood temper tantrums, or psychological meltdowns involving empty Starbucks cups.
This radial engine also for some reason got me thinking about measurements in radial form as well as tangential. So this week I wanted to show you some more of the Inventor sketching tools that have been around for a while, but are not necessarily that discoverable to a user that hasn't been trained professionally or had to the time to stumble/snoop around in the software enough to realize they are there. Even if you already know this then at least you get to hear my voice again :).
SketchTips - Arc Slot Dimensioning from Mark Flayler on Vimeo.
Now, over the course of years at IMAGINiT and onsite consulting, training, and implementations, I have also come to really understand the problem IT creates for a lot of their engineers. Usually this is a problem of the few that hurt the majority, but there are many IT groups that block streaming video of any kind. In the past I switched from YouTube to Vimeo for the majority of my videos because IT sometimes will block YouTube only and not other sites (Don't forget, you can also download my Vimeo videos directly which is something YouTube doesn't allow). Well for those that have all video blocked, I am going to try and start providing more imagery as well in the post. So here you go...
When placing Tangential dimensions it is important to grab both arcs or circles you want to be referenced. Now when this is done normally you get center to center dimesnions, but if you hover enough around the arc you will see a different glyph appear behind your cursor. This glyph represents a tangential referencing rather than CP to CP.
Next up, look at angular dimensions to line up angular and arc slots. Now this is something I see done as a work around all the time. Where a user will place a construction line radiating from the center to each point and will then dimension based on those construction lines and their constrained placement. In my opinion there is nothing really wrong with that except that it takes longer to set up and lock down compared to using just angular values and perhaps a symmetry line here or there.
To make the constraining of these slots easier just use a normal General Dimension and choose points to place your angular value. When you grab your first two points you could place a dimension, but if you keep grabbing and go for a third point you will get your angular reference.
There you have it, a nice angular and tangential set of tools to your arsenal...and I didn't even need psychological turmoil to create this art. Here are the files I played with in case you want to give it a go:
Great tips. Those will be very handy.
Also, thanks for the alternatives to watching the video. Streaming sites aren't blocked at my workplace, but the connection is so slow they might as well be.
Posted by: CodyM | 06/03/2010 at 06:04 PM
Nice article
Posted by: Amy | 07/15/2010 at 08:38 AM