a few questions

[mckenziewesley]

Hi

I'm pretty much a newbie on here. I recently purchased inventor 2008 pro and well, i'm teaching myself how to use it. there are a few things that i have run into that just do not seem to be intuitive or work the way that i think that they should work, so, i have some questions!

1) Using the design accelerator to create spur gears / shafts. I don't get it. lol. I'm sure there is a trick, but, i haven't been able to figure it out. I want two gears of a particular gear ratio.. I am limited by interferecence which limits the large gear diameter (well, it would with where i'd LIKE to put the gear, but, i could move its location along the shaft such that the gear diameter would not be an issue). So, my question is, how do i do this? Can i use the design accelerator to put one spur gear on one shaft, one on another?

The other question is why doesn't design accelerator give you a hole to put the gear on a shaft?

Basically, i just need a walkthrough on how the heck to properly use this feature. I'm trying to work through the documentation that i have, but, i'm hoping that somebody could quickly point me to a helpful tutorial or at least a good starting point...

Thanks a ton!

Wes

[JD Mather]

I would concentrate on the basics of the software before getting into the Design Acclerators. (you would add the holes as features as needed after creation with DAcc)

Go through all of the Help>Tutorials and Skill Builders.
You might want to go through this document - (although it isn't going to answer your specific question)

http://home.pct.edu/~jmather/AU2007/...L%20Mather.pdf

and then go through the tutorials found here

http://www.mcadforums.com/forums/vie...dd9a0ca40448c0

I then recommend attaching specific Inventor ipt and iam files with a well defined problem description for someone to show you the road to a solution. Welcome to the Inventor community.

[mckenziewesley]

Thanks a bunch

I will take a look through those. I really appreciate how helpful people are on this forum. Alot of places (forums in general) you start feeling like an *** before you even finish asking the question - it's nice to come someplace where you feel like you can ask your question even if isn't framed in the way a 30 year veteran would pose it.

[mckenziewesley]

Another quick question -

When you are assigning constraints to mate one part with another part - sometimes this is a pain in the ***. Hopefully doing the skill builders / reading through the documentation will take care of my misconception.

example of this. i was in a new assembly, i placed a plate and then placed two bushing housings. My first mate was to constrain the bottom surface of the bushing housing to the top surface of the plate, then i constrained the narrow edge to one edge of the plate, then for my final constraint i wanted to offset the long edge of the bushing housing from the edge of the plate by 0.75 inches. So, i click on the "obvious" side edge of the bushing housing and then click on the edge of the plate and then type in 0.75 in for the offset amount. Instead of ending up offset 0.75 inches on the plate, but in from the edge, it ended up 0.75 inches out in space, off the plate.

Is this a setup issue? Why does inventor think it is smarter than me? I figure that this has to do with the coordinate system and orientation in which i originally drew the bushing housing and then direction i extruded it. Why doesn't Inventor just simply let me "realize" my error and let me type in a negative number for the offset so that the part moves the way I want it to? (instead of leaving me to try and figure out where i screwed up and figure out a work around).

[bub4]

I have a couple of comments for constraints. The thing I found that helped me most with constraints was just to keep getting my feet wet. I was continually getting frustrated with them but finally I have some level of comfort in using constraints. Also I try to constrain to the origin planes as much as possible. Constraining to edges/planes etc. of other parts may find you losing constraints or placing parts where you don't want them if a part was to change dimensionally. Just some thoughts..................

[mckenziewesley]

i agree with your assessment of the "getting your feet wet" thing. I've gotten a much better handle on it now, but - sheez, it does not seem to be terribly intuitive. The order seems to be important. I believe inventor remembers which way parts were extruded and uses that to assign a sign to direction. Maybe that's why on alot of the tutorials you see people are extruding midplane vs in one direction. I dunno, I haven't revisisted the gear issue yet as i've kinda moved onto a different project for now.

here's a question - why are inventors built in part libraries so heavily biased towards metric parts? Why aren't the libraries divided into metric/standard? Again, maybe that's another issue of my work process not matching the "intended" work flow process that the developers of inventor had in mind. /shrug.

[JD Mather]

here's a question - why are inventors built in part libraries so heavily biased towards metric parts? Why aren't the libraries divided into metric/standard?

Perhaps because most of the world is biased towards metric.

You can separate the libraries in t metric/inch and not even see any metric if that is what you need. I would suggest the other way around though.

[mckenziewesley]

lol

i cannot help it if most of the world does not understand that there are more numbers that divide evenly into 12 than into 10. Plus, standard works better from an artistic point of view - things in art are often divided into 3's etc. It's kinda hard to do a 1/3 of a meter ya know?