Creating a Routed System with Vanilla Autodesk Inventor

If you didn’t sleep through the previous post, you were promised some stuff at the very end. This is that stuff. It took longer than it should have as I had to get some drawings to the plumber. Without further ado…

The next part needed in this assembly is another 4” ‘Long Sweep’ elbow that goes somewhere below the circle that represents the closet flange penetration. To place this part, I needed to align the axis of one of its legs to an axis running through the center of the circle parallel to the Z Origin Axis. That axis does not exist, so I needed to create it.

A quick note about structure before I continue. All of the layout sketches and work features being created are located within the Plumbing Layout.ipt part file which is located within the Plumbing_08-25-10.iam. All of the plumbing parts are located in the same assembly as can be seen in the image of the Browser Bar to the above (click).

Creating a Work Axis has a lot in common with creating a plane on point. With the Plumbing Layout part active, I just grabbed the Axis tool from the Work features panel, and clicked on the centerpoint of the circle and the Z Origin Axis. I’ve hovered my cursor over the newly created axis in the image below to highlight it (red line) because Inventor has no color scheme close to the white one I created, so it defaults some features to a yellow color that is very hard to see (I seem to remember a color scheme changing tool in the SDK package, if so, I’ll see if I can create a new color scheme in the next post).

Placing The Parts

The next part needed in this assembly is the 4” Long Sweep elbow, which I copy & pasted the previous one to get, then constrained the axis of its upper leg to the Work Axis just created…

The part then moved over to align with the previously placed Work Axis and was free to spin about the axis as well as move up and down along it.

Because I will be connecting to the sewer main at a 45° angle, my next move was to constrain this part to reflect that. To do so, I expanded the part’s Origin folder, and hovered my cursor over the Origin Planes until the one that bisected the part vertically highlighted, then clicked.

With the plane in the part already selected, the Place Constraint dialog popped up looking for the other half of the constraint. First I changed the Type of constraint to Angle, then set the Angle to 45, the Solution to Undirected Angle, then I clicked on the XZ Origin Plane shown highlighted below…

Because the part was already on a slight angle in the right direction, the constraint solved correctly. If I wanted it the other way, I would have turned the part a bit before starting.

The next part to place is the wye that will connect this branch to the main. After placing the part and rotating it a bit (Rotate tool on the Position panel) so that the next constraint will solve correctly, I started up the Constraint tool and clicked on the through section of the wye (Cyan below), then the main pipe in a place roughly where I want the wye…

And there you have it. A Wye branch on the main line…

Of course the main line passes right through the Wye, but we’ll pay that no never-mind for now.

Next I copied & pasted the main line again, and this time constrained it axis to axis to the branch on the wye…

…then dragged the pipe so that its left end was near new elbow, and created a Swivel Constraint between the end of the pipe and the bottom of the elbow’s horizontal leg socket…