I figured this series would likely turn out to be three or four fairly long posts as it took 3 or 4 hours to create the original model used in the ComPOWTS story.
As it turns out, hours spent modeling have no relation to the page count it takes to describe said modeling. Whoda thunk? But back to the modeling. I left off in the last article cutting away the artifact geometry on the top platform thingie—which I think houses a fan, a thermostat, and possibly some other controls. The modeling technique for that was very similar to the one before it.
The holes on the other hand, are a bit different. For these I created a sketch on the same face that the last extrusion was extruded to (the upper platform), and turned on the original sketch with the dimensioned image so that I could access the dimensions.
I then deleted the geometry that Inventor projected for me (not needed in this case), and projected the lines shown below……..the outermost edges of the unit in that particular corner…
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I then drew three circles in roughly the right place and size. From there it’s just a matter of adding a dimension to one of the circles then spinning the model around to the visible dimensions on the plan view sketch, and selecting the corresponding dimension as shown in the image below…
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…which gave me this…
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From there, both larger circles were extruded upwards to a height that was determined in the side view sketch. I just guessed at the hole sizes. It’s very easy to change later when the Hole tool is used to create them. The result is shown below…
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The last thing I wanted to do before moving on to the chamfers was create the pipe stub-outs on the sides. I began by turning the side elevation block’s visibility back on, and created an offset plane 20” up from the bottom of the unit (center of the pipes according to the drawing).
To do so I grabbed the Plane tool, clicked the bottom surface and started dragging upwards. After starting the drag, I released the cursor and entered the dimension in the little Offset window as shown below…
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A sketch was created on this plane, and the Slice Graphics tool (right click context menu) was used again, as well as the Project Cut Edges tool (Draw panel on the Sketch tab). The result is shown below…
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As you can see, the centerpoint of the circle was a bit too high, but it doesn’t matter at all. The location front to back is what I needed, so I projected the centerpoint down to the sketch, then created a line out to the projected geometry at the perimeter as shown below…
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