Autodesk has over the years added a lot of standard tools for drawing documentation to Inventor, however, sometimes they just totally miss one that gets used a lot in different fields. Dowel symbols are used a lot in a lot of industries including furniture and die making, however despite its presence in other 3D CAD systems, it has yet to make an appearance in Inventor.
To help alleviate this there is an app in the Autodesk Inventor Exchange store called QuickDowel from 3D Quick Tools Limited. In this post we will take a look at this tools as well as the traditional ways to add dowel symbols to your Inventor drawings. Let's start off with a look at the app. Once installed you get a new Tab on your Ribbon in the drawing environment with a single tool on it.
Once you start the QuickDowel tool you are presented with a dialog to start placing in the automated symbol on to each hole you want to specify as a dowel symbol. You do have to hold down CTRL to get more than one hole at a time. Once created the dowel symbol is actually pretty unintelligent because if the hole size changes, the symbol has to be recreated or re-sized after the change in the drawing.
Inherently there are a lot of design problems with this little app. To be honest I come up with more negatives than positives for this tool.
Negatives
- New Tab with only one Command on it
- Sloppy marketing of the name (no space in the name)
- Non-associative geometry once created
- Non-intuitive placement of the dowel symbols
Positives
It decreases the manual steps to create the actual symbol. So in review of this app, don't bother. In fact I actually had some buggy issues with the app not working after first usage.
So, how should this have been done instead? Well here are the manual steps to perform this properly...
- Create a sketch on a view
- Project the geometry of the hole
- Create 4 line segments that radiate from the center
- Create a solid hatch in 2 quadrants
Be sure to vote on the Idea Station to get this tool added to Autodesk Inventor. We just need more votes.
Here is a screencast of the process...
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