Square Holes In Autodesk Inventor?

In fine woodworking, square holes are as common as round ones. So why is it that none of the popular 3D parametric design programs include the option?

The answer is that they were created as Mechanical Design software with metal in mind. Inventor, for instance,  can be used to create anything under the sun — but its modeling tools have always had a bias towards designing metal entities….until recently.  Two versions ago, a set of plastic specific  tools were added to the standard version of Inventor,  marking the first non metal or generic toolset to make it into the program. I don’t work much in plastic, but it was a great day nonetheless.

But what about wood?

Well…..there are no wood-specific tools Inventor, and for the most part, there is no need for them. The one feature I would include (and the subject of this article) is a square hole option………… and I believe that it should live right there on the hole dialog (image above) with the round ones. After all, square holes are a reality in woodworking, and Inventor is about more than just metal. Yes?

I regularly create single square holes in wood for the tenon pins that hold my furniture together, and an overlapping series of these holes would create your average mortise. To create these in the real world, I use a hollow chisel mortising bit such as the one shown below. It can be chucked into a drill press with an adapter, or preferably,  used in a dedicated mortiser. For those who have never seen one of these, the flat bottomed bit spins inside the stationary hollow chisel, and the two move together into the wood just like a drill in a drill press. The chips move up inside the hollow body to the slot for removal, and the extremely sharp chisel edges pare away all that is not square.

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Having a square hole option on the Hole dialog would have several benefits such as speeding up the modeling/drawing annotation processes, as well as displaying a clearer design in the Browser Bar as shown in the image to the right…

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…but, until Autodesk adds the feature to Inventor ….. or some coding guru writes an add-in, things need to be done the generic way.

Creating a generic  mortise

The way to create a square hole in Inventor today is to draw a rectangle on the face of your part, and extrude-cut the profile into the part…

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It’s not rocket science…… and not all that hard to do, but somewhat less than optimal.  A better way would be to save the feature as an iFeature that can be reused forever…. or at least until there is a square hole feature in Inventor.

 I’ll post a tutorial on how to create and place an iFeature in the next post. Till then…