Tag Archives: Woodworking Design

The woodworking design featured on the Open Design Project is created with high-end Autodesk Inventor with iLogic rules-based modeling techniques

Autodesk Inventor Tutorial for Designing a Shaker Table – 1 – Getting Started

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As stated in a previous post, the scope of this Autodesk Inventor Tutorial was increased from showing how a mortise & tenon joint can be modeled so that they automatically match each other, to a full blown table design that incorporates the afore mentioned matching magic.

The correct way to model something like this in Inventor is by using layout parts containing multi-solid bodies. Several years back (or currently in some ERP systems) this would have been accomplished by separate parts that share global parameters e.g.: a mortise width in one part and the tenon width in another are both controlled by a common parameter called MT_Width. You also could have used cross part dependencies with adaptivity, but that schema was incredibly buggy and failure prone. It also ate up system resources If I remember correctly, but in any case, just don’t go there.On with this incredibly kick-butt Autodesk Inventor Tutorial…

I’m going to make this tutorial easy enough for a person with just a tad of Inventor experience can follow along. If you are a more advanced user, you may feel like skipping ahead –but you never know when you will pick up a new technique. There are numerous ways to accomplish almost anything in Inventor, and I try to mix my techniques up to show as many as I can.

To begin the model, start a sketch on the XY Plane (may have happened automatically), and name it Top Sketch. The only reason to add the “Sketch” part to the name is that you will later have both features and solid bodies that need to be named, (names must be unique) and I prefer to reserve, in this instance the name “Top” for the solid body. This way when the solid bodies are turned into parts, they will have the names I want without any further work.

 

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The Autodesk Inventor Tutorial for a Shaker Table

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I had originally thought I would whip up a quickie tutorial (Progressive Mortise and Tenon iLogicTutorial) showing how one could model a mortise and tenon joint that could have both parts of the change in in unison…

…which I did, but by the time I had that much done it just made sense to continue this Inventor Tutorial to include the whole damn table. You see…. the way the table is designed, only a quarter of the table is modeled before mirroring the elements to create the whole schlemiel. In the real world (when not creating a tutorial) it probably took a half hour to model ¼ of the table, then another five minutes to create the rest by mirroring.

How to deliver the tutorial is somewhat problematic though. This website uses WordPress as a CMS (Content Management System). It’s fantastic for organizing and storing things, but formatting –not so much. I’ll figure it out though.

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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.

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What I Did Last Summer (Fall, Winter, and Spring)

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Well…….. It’s been an incredibly long time since my last post. Over a year if you disregard the lame one about using Fractions in Parameters posted way back in in January. The reason for this huge posting lapse Is that I have been working on a contract job in Washington State…

…and since June, I’ve been building the little BIM Eco House half days and on weekends in addition to the contract work. A very busy summer!

But now, the contract with the Washington company has wrapped up and I am fairly well caught up on the house build leaving me with enough time to write at least a couple articles a week from here on in. I plan to link these efforts here at the ODP with my Autodesk Inventor for Woodworkers LinkedIn Group (feel free to join) as I haven’t done squat there either (I started the group just before I left for Washington last year).

Near-term Website Focus

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3D Model of a BIM Eco Cottage Showing PEX Routed Systems

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This video shows the current progress on the BIM (Building Information Model) Eco Cottage (Blackhawk Cottage) currently in the works here at the Open Design Project. The video specifically shows the state of the routed systems such as the gas lines, the DWV (Drain Waste Vent) system, and the PEX plumbing.

I am hoping to have the water lines completely routed by the end of the week, and then jump over to the electrical, but I have quite a few other commitments this week so things may take a bit longer.  Enjoy the video and have a great day…

 

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Creating Mortises as an iFeature in Autodesk Inventor

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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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