BIM Models Via Reverse Engineering With Autodesk Inventor – Part 9

July 23, 2010 by Mark Randa

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.

.

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°…  

Creating a new plane

.

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…

Creating the centerline

.

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

The knob sketch

.

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…

.

Revolve procedure

.

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

.

The knob revolve

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. ..

Knob plane


Pages: 1 2





Posted in Autodesk, Autodesk Inventor, BIM, ComPOWTS, Eco Design, Greywater, Seed House, Tutorials