Working with Purchased and Multipurpose Parts - Autodesk Inventor 2010: No Experience Required - page 258

Reusing Your Own Parts
So far, you've had a couple of opportunities to interact with the Content Center.
Of course, we're just scratching the surface of all its potential. But the Content
Center doesn't contain components that you've created yourself and want to reuse.
It's possible to add components that you've created to the Content Center and
make it possible for everyone to access them. I think that topic goes beyond the
scope of this topic, but I did want to show you an option for automating con-
straints for commonly used components.
iMates
Every assembly constraint has two halves. A face or an edge on one part is
related to a face or edge on another. To completely constrain a part in the
assembly, you need to repeat the process of applying these constraints several
times on a part.
The iMate concept allows you to construct half of the assembly constraints for
a component ahead of time and store them in the components. To really exploit
the function, you can apply the incomplete constraints to several interchange-
able parts; doing so lets you swap them for one another in an assembly without
having to reapply constraints.
To defi ne an iMate, you select the iMate tool from the Author panel in the
Manage tab. When it starts, you defi ne half an assembly constraint the way you
normally would.
If you have a component constrained in an assembly and you would like to
incorporate its existing constraints into iMates, you can select the constraints
in the Browser and select Infer iMates from the right-click context menu. You
won't do that in this chapter, but it's good to be aware of the option.
Let's use the manual method to develop an iMate set.
NOTE To complete the exercises in this chapter, you'll need to down-
load the Switch.ipt , Motor.zip , and Caster.stp files from www.sybex
.com/go/inventor2010ner .
Creating an iMate
In this exercise, you'll review an existing iMate set and build a companion set in
the fan assembly:
1. Place the Switch.ipt fi le in the C:\Data\Parts folder.
2. Open the switch part in Inventor. See Figure 6.1.