BIM Models Via Reverse Engineering With Autodesk Inventor – Part 9

This is it. The last of the reverse engineering of the composting toilet series. All that remains are the four knobs on the lower drawer of the humanure maker.

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The exact profile of the knobs is somewhat shady, but with a bit of educated guesswork, they’ll come out great for all intents and purposes. In the image below, you can see that I started by creating a sketch on the lower front face, then placing and centering a point on what I would call the right hand stile of the poo drawer.  The next step is to create a plane 90° to the face using the construction line that was used to center the point horizontally.

The only difference between this plane created on a line and the others in this series is that I selected the line, then instead of one of the Origin planes, I selected the face that the line sits on. The angle was left at the default 90°…  

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A sketch was created on the new plane, the point was projected onto the new sketch, and a line was drawn from that point and dimensioned to 1 5/8” –which is what I gleaned from the image of this thing. I then changed the line type to a centerline as shown below…

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This is what I came up with for the knob’s Revolve profile…

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From there I just hit the R on the keyboard to fire up the Revolve command. With a closed profile and a centerline, the profile was automatically selected and the default Full extents was active…

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…so I just hit enter to accept. Which produced this…

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The next thing I did was create a plane tangential to the rounded top of the knob and parallel to the face of the drawer. To do so, I simply grabbed the Plane tool, and clicked on the rounded part of the knob then the face of the drawer. ..