BIM Models Via Reverse Engineering With Autodesk Inventor

The features that I’ll model in this post are those that comprise the front hatch group. The group consists of a rectangular hatch with wire U-handles on either side, and a round grille in the center.

In reality, the drain on the right hand side would be the only thing that I would need at this point, but I’m committed to making this poo composter pretty(er). If you had a lot stuff in close proximity to the unit in your digital prototype, you may need some of the handles, etc. to check clearances as well.

To begin the hatch, I created a sketch on the angled front face. I immediately window selected the projected geometry and turned it into construction geometry. In the original drawing, the hatch appeared to extend from fillet to fillet vertically, so I created a rectangle to reflect that. I know the width to be 11” from the tracing, so I added that dimension for the width. I then used the Offset tool from the Modify panel to step in the rectangle .125”. I centered a circle in the rectangle and sized it to 8”, giving me what you can see below…

Hatch sketch

Just two features to go. A handle that will be mirrored, and the grille. The handle part as can be seen below started with a horizontal line between the circle and the rectangle that was horizontally constrained to the circle’s center. A vertical line was then drawn crossing the first, and the two were constrained center to center. A circle was created at the bottom of the line (the profile for the handles), and the line was given a dimension gleaned from the original drawing —3 ½” to the outside…

Hatch sketch - the handle

For the grille pattern, I just drew a center line that was constrained to the center point, then lines to one side that were close to what I wanted. I then drew a vertical construction line through them, and split it at each line, and created equal constraints between the segments. The whole mess was then mirrored over to the other side…

Grille sketch