Inventor for PressTools & Exhaust Pipes?.......

[Sirius2]

Has anyone had any luck using Inventor for exhaust pipe fixtures or multistage (forming) presstools yet?.
How about modelling things in an assembly that are non contacting (yet positioned in relation to each other on a fixture) and at compound angles in 'car line' orientation?.

If you can follow what on earth Im describing, lol.

For example, an exhaust pipe which has flange/mounting plates on each end & multiple brackets along its 3d path positioned in space at different radial positions along pipe and around pipe bend sectons etc..

The partially surfaced iges pipe data sent is usually positioned in 'car line', ie way out in space at like x3500mm,y2567mm,z1235mm etc and may need orientating a particular way round relative to the fixture 'baseplate'. eg, to get a particular portion of the pipe perfectly axial in normal space, or a bracket horizontal etc.

Just curious to whether its possible to do fully inside in Inventor yet......Some linked examples or know how in this area would be fantastic as Im still lost in how inventor etc can do these tasks, we cant all be product designers .

Im gonna pester the SolidQuirks and SolidEgg crew aswell, lol.


Thanks for any response,

Sirius.

 

[ZachiGat]

Inventor 6 have new option call "Grounded work point" which help defining the points of the pipes.
Inventor 7.5 that will be released in the summer, there will be an option to buy special application for piping build by autodesk.

 

[autocol]

it's really easy to model something at the right coordinates for particular machine. you should look up "skeletal modeling" which is a technique almost unique to inventor that makes it really easy to model something at the right location for the car/plane/boat/bathtub it belongs to...

 

[mccarvil]

What is "skeletal modelling"?
I have Inventor 6.0 with SP1 and cannot find any reference to "skeletal modelling".
Is it in V6 or a later release? What should I search/ look for?

 

[Sirius2]

Thanks for the replies .

Im still not much wiser on how to tackle this kind of job in inventor.....how do you move a load fragmented portions of say a pipe to a more manageable position (ie not stuck a milion miles out in space from zero zero?) and tweak the said items to a postion/orientation you desire?.

I'll try and find something on skeletal modelling. It rings a bell actually, perhaps I saw some brief blurb on it once for inventor 5....but I dont remember it being very clear.

I saw the newly released blurb for 'Inventor7 Professional' which contains some sort of pipework and wire routing additions which are not on the normal version.

The examples shown are like electrical wiring paths for the routing, and Im assuming the piping one will be more like industrial piping (connectors and L bends etc) which is not the same as exhaust piping which dips around bends and curves at the same time(???).

One last thing.....Ive been having a go on somebodys Inventor 7 lately. His machine is a AMD athlon 950, with 516 RAM and a 64ddrMb GeForce Mx2 (I think) graphics card. It keeps crashing down ("Inventor has had to close - sorry for inconvenience&quot, especially on free rotating the model. The model only contained about 15 basic parts.

This isnt very impressive, there is no equivalent of the .bak file you used to get in AutoCad it would seem.....I was quite dismayed at the frequency of this occuring (say every 25 minutes). You spend half your time pressing save to try and not lose your work.
I think his machine is good enough to run Inventor as it runs other similar software no trouble. Any ideas why it bombs out? I hope its not bad programming code.

Thanks again,


Sirius.

 

[autocol]

skeletal modeling - a big subject... and not a "feature" of inventor per se... more an extremely powerful accident, and not documented as a result.

very briefly: ever used the derived component tool? you can use it to "suck" information from one part to another, be it the solid body (which you can mirror), parameters, work features, imates, sketches, anything really.

if you draw a simple sketch in a part, with a few different regions in it (press extrude and check they're all valid profiles). then save the part as "layout.ipt" or whatever. then start a new part, finish and delete the first sketch, and use derived component to import the sketch from the layout into your new part. extrude one of the regions of that sketch. then create another part, do the same process, and import a different region of the sketch. continue for as many parts you've got.

now, derived component retains a link between the parts, so if you now change your layout sketch, hey presto, all your other parts update (which, in the case of a semi trailer project i recently finished, number in the hundreds of unique...)

it's an extremely powerful and, once you have the hang of it, easy way to control large assemblies, and even better, all the parts "know" where they go in the assy, because they're are all modeled off the same sketch (or group of sketches, you can get very complex with it) and therefore all share the same origin point.

if you bring all your parts into a new assy and constrain their origins together (which is achieved by mating the X axes of both parts together, then the Y axes...) then all the parts magically fit together...

have a look on

http://www.mymcad.com

where i believe drew spent more than the five minutes i've just taken to explain this technique...

HTH

col.