Monthly Archives: February 2012

How-To Create Templates in Autodesk Inventor

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How to create template files in Autodesk InventorTemplates are a very productive way of reusing modified Inventor files. For example, LENGTH, WIDTH, and THICKNESS iPropertes for woodworkers that normally create cutlists. Or you can have a company standards FX part pre-inserted (something I do). If you only work with a certain material, your template file can have that material already applied. You get the gist.

 You can literally have hundreds of modified part, assembly, drawing, presentation, and weldment files that are preconfigured for a certain client, a certain work-flow, or what have you. As I told a reader In the comments yesterday, I keep folders of template files for specific companies that I subcontract for in an archive, and when I again do business with them, I drop their folder into the Inventor Templates folder and voila!

 

Creating new template tabs in Autodesk Inventor

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iLogic Tutorial for Creating a Woodworking Cutlist

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We’ll start this iLogic tutorial by informing you that there is no built-in cutlist functionality in Autodesk Inventor –parts lists, sure, but a parts list in most cases is about as useful as teats on a bull. I will likely go back later and split the top and create a glue-up schedule as well, but for now, an automated cutlist.

I cobbled together the technique used in this iLogic tutorial back when iLogic was a subscription bonus add-in a few years back. It uses Custom iProperties  to hold WIDTH, LENGTH, and THICKNESS values on a per-part basis. These values are filled in automatically using and iLogic rule that reads parameters in the parts, and are then used at the drawing level in fields of the same name.

This tutorial builds upon the twenty three previous tutorials in the Shaker Table series. On with the Cutlist Tutorial. Begin by opening up the Designing a Shaker Table with Autodesk Inventor.iam (the assembly). From there open the layout part which should be at the top of the list in the Browser Bar. We need to know all of the parameters that describe the width, length, and thickness of the Leg A solid body so that we can bring them into the assembly. Looking at the Parameter Editor, we can see one of them, Leg_Width…

 

iLogic Tutorial for Creating a Woodworking Cutlist image 01 - Autodesk Inventor Tutorial

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