Progressive Mortise and Tenon iLogic Tutorial

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I received an email a couple days ago from a student at the University of Michigan that goes like this:

 

Hi Mark,

I just discovered your blog – very nice.

I was impressed by your parametric Mission Table. Especially how you handled the parametric mortise and tenon joints. I’ve been able to make parametric tenons no problem – but I don’t know how to make the mortises auto-update when the tenon changes. Does your model do that? If so – any way you can share it – or a part of it – so I can see how you accomplished that?

Again, thanks for your blog.

Sincerely,
Mark Meier

The short answer was no.

Generally mortise and tenon joints are sized to the available tooling, and are based on the particulars of the design at hand. In my case, I use a Powermatic 719A Mortiser (shown to the right) and have ¼”, ⅜”, ½”, ⅝” and ¾” hollow chisels. While designing a piece, I pick one of the chisel sizes based on the strength (or other factors) needed for the furniture item in question. A ¾” thick stretcher on an end table usually gets a ¼” tenon, and the leg gets a ¼” mortise to match.

But in the case of work being sent to a CNC router (or template routing by hand), there is a bit more flexibility as to joint size. You may want to tweak a tenon size up a bit when switching from white oak to pine for instance.

I really need to add an iLogic tutorial or four, so I decided to create one for this scenario. I think I’ll use a leg and apron section, and possibly add an adjustable Shaker style taper to the leg.

 

 

An iLogic Tutorial generally runs about 20 pages or-so, so this may take a while to fully post. I may post some ERP related posts in-between, but then again, maybe not ;)

There are links to the entire series in the right hand column. Enjoy!

 

Later…

 


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6 thoughts on “Progressive Mortise and Tenon iLogic Tutorial”

  2. Hi Paul good to hear from you!

    You are absolutely positively correct. I haven’t used cross part dependencies or their resultant adaptivity since I started working with multi solid body parts back in their inception. Adaptivity was nearly useless due to the limitation on the number of parts that could participate. For instance: you could not build a five part adaptive drawer box. After 3 (or was it 4) parts, it would fail to work. Even when it was working it sucked big time.

    At any rate, the tutorial will be a multi solid body layout part that will be derived into parts, which will in turn be demoted to an assembly. Gotta get back to the modeling. Hope you stop back to see it.

  3. May I suggest if I understand you question correctly, that you derive the tenon parameters into your part file that has your mortis part. This does not cause adaptivity.

  4. Hi Charles,

    I’m not sure if I understand your question (comment?). But if you are asking if the act of deriving the solid bodies into components creates a dependency between the layout part and the resultant parts that are derived from same, then yes, there is a dependency –unless the link is broken between them.

    This is not a cross part dependency though –such as the type you get when projecting geometry between parts from within an assembly. This is the solution to that problematic work-flow.

    This is more of a parent – child relationship. There is no adaptivity whatsoever in the final derived parts. The parent (layout) part resides within each of the children. When the parent changes, so do the children.

    Keep checking back. Things will get interesting in the coming posts…

  5. Hi Mark,
    I just started less than 2 days with your model, thank you so much. I learn alot from here. I know you are busy to put up a new lessons for all of us. But I wonder if you could share this model through the end included drawings with parts, sizes and ballon..etc.
    I think it is cool to see a whole model that show how inventor could do, especially with your professional way.
    Many thanks for this.

    Luong

    • Hi Luong,

      You are quite welcome!

      Yes, this, and several other tutorials will be posted from beginning to end, and will likely be gone back to and added onto in the future as well. The end of this one will be a drawing set with a cutlist, but before that there is quite a bit of iLogic code. Stay tuned

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