How-to Restructure an Autodesk Inventor Assembly
….or, what I did last summer, then the restructure stuff.
Sorry for the lack of posts lately, but I have been incredibly busy as of late. As of this year, I am the new Autodesk Inventor Instructor at a major CAD Tutorial Producer . Over the past six months or so, I have produced 368 Autodesk Inventor video lessons that span nearly 32 hours, and cover Autodesk Inventor 2014 from ‘soup to nuts’.
More about that later……….. but for now, stick around for a brief lesson on assembly modeling where I will show how to restructure newly added elements of a large assembly. I will do so using some of the BIM-esque work I have been doing on the Blackhawk Cottage. I recently routed the ducting for the cottage’s 18,000 btu high efficiency wall furnace (it takes very little to heat the place), and I’m nearly done installing that ducting, so I’ll include some images of that as well.
The placement of the PVC pipe for the unit was pretty tricky because of the incredibly tight spaces it needed to go into, and the fact that I don’t want to build bulkheads all over the place to hide things. There is a 3” mechanical chase built into what I refer to as the, of all things, mechanical wall, and this pair of pipes had to make its way through much of the already built wall. This is because when the cottage was originally designed, they did not make high efficiency furnaces small enough for a small ultra efficient design. Now they do, and before the wall is sealed up, the ductwork needed to be in place.
The image below shows how I started routing the duct. It is a part created in-place in the Master Assembly, and grounded at the origin. From there I project whatever geometry is needed to create the pipe run, which in this case is self draining back to the heater…
It would have been nice to just go straight through the wall, but that is the front of the building. The location chosen is within a cluster of mechanical venting so as not to have stuff poking out along the entire wall. On a small home such as this, it starts to resemble a porcupine pretty quickly.
The new pipes are the PVC ones closest to the viewer, and are capped off at this time. The others are the Air to Air exhaust and the On-Demand water heater exhaust…
To get the pipes to that location took some doing. As you can see in the image below, the pipes had to pass in front of a large electrical conduit as well as a cluster of flex conduit (blue) that runs to the media hub…
And here is the area where the pipes exit…
In this close-up, you can see the cottage’s construction. From the 7/16” OSB outward, the next layer is an uninterrupted 2” EPS skin, then ¾” furring attached to the studs through the foam, and finally the seamless steel siding. On this side of the OSB will be 5 ½” high density insulation. The R-Value for the walls exceeds R-31…
Back to the model…
As you can see in the image to the right, everything below the Electronics assembly is new to the model, and is all part of the plumbing for the heater, so I will be Demoting everything below the Electronics assembly into a new assembly. To do so, I simply select all of the parts below the Electronics assembly…
…then chose Component > Demote from the context menu. I saved the file in the HVAC folder as Heater.iam…
Clicking OK brings up this nag screen if it hasn’t been permanently dismissed already…
The end result is a nice tidy assembly, that will eventually become a sub-assembly of the HVAC assembly.
That’s about it for How-to Restructure an Autodesk Inventor Assembly. If you need some professional Autodesk Inventor Services, stop just contact us. Thanks for stopping by!
