For those of you who have created your own background image for Inventor and need a color scheme to match –or if you just want to fine tune things to fit your style, there is a way to do so.

The stock color schemes that ship with Inventor are, in my opinion, just fine for most people for the majority of uses. But, with a white background such as the one used for the ‘Presentation’ color scheme,  there is a problem with a couple items that use yellow as their color such as the work axes  shown below (click)…

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In my post titled Square Holes In Autodesk Inventor?, I promised to give a quick tutorial on how to create a mortising tool as an iFeature, so here it goes…

Inventor iFeatures are incredibly easy to create, and can save huge amounts of time on those tasks you need to perform on a regular basis, and are not already present as a tool in the main program. What it does is allows you to save a feature and its underlying sketch and parameters  for perpetual reuse.

How I generally create these is that during the course of regular modeling, I come across a feature that I need to create that I feel will be needed again enough to warrant creating an iFeature. They are very easy to make, so the only problem you may run into is having too many —and possibly having a hard time finding the one you are looking for. Whatever the case may be, one you decide to create on, you just model the feature as you would normally, making sure to create parameters for any dimensions as they will be reused and cam be modified in future iterations of the feature.

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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.

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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°…   Read the rest of this entry →

The features that I’ll model in this post are those that comprise the front hatch group. The group consists of a rectangular hatch with wire U-handles on either side, and a round grille in the center.

In reality, the drain on the right hand side would be the only thing that I would need at this point, but I’m committed to making this poo composter pretty(er).  If you had a lot stuff in close proximity to the unit in your digital prototype, you may need some of the handles, etc. to check clearances as well.

To begin the hatch, I created a sketch on the angled front face. I immediately window selected the projected geometry and turned it into construction geometry. In the original drawing, the hatch appeared to extend from fillet to fillet vertically, so I created a rectangle to reflect that. I know the width to be 11” from the tracing, so I added that dimension for the width.  I then used the Offset tool from the Modify panel to step in the rectangle .125”. I centered a circle in the rectangle and sized it to 8”, giving me what you can see below…
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Just the corner bracing, top, and some square pins left to model, then it’s mostly patterning from there on in … and a bit of chamfering to finish things off.

  The highlighted geometry you can see in the image to the right is the projected sketch that was used to create the corner brace. The lines seen stabbing into the aprons are representations of the screw holes that will come shortly. One of these same lines was also used to create the plane that the screw and bolt sketches were laid out on.

  The hole layout sketch is mostly constrained to projected geometry, with only the two dimensions shown below added to the equation. There are Equal constraints, Coincident constraints to projected points, along with Horizontal and Vertical constraints to create a fully constrained sketch. As per usual, here is no geometry projected from solids… Read the rest of this entry →