Functional Design Using Design Accelerators - Autodesk Inventor 2010: No Experience Required - page 316

Now you've placed a bearing, and you know that it's capable of doing the job.
Using the standards that govern the production of the bearings to help guide
your selection ahead of time rather than doing hours of testing can be a huge
cost savings. This too is an example of using a digital prototype.
Let's build the shaft that the fan blade will be mounted to. But rather than using
Extrude or Revolve, you'll use another design accelerator that is purpose-built.
The Shaft Component Generator
This tool builds round things. It's especially adept at round things that spin, so
it offers some great features for rotating shafts.
Like all design accelerators, the Shaft Component Generator can be used sim-
ply as a quick way to draw a shaft; but it has extraordinary tools to validate a
shaft based on what you need for performance.
In the upper-right corner are icons that allow you to save the shaft confi gura-
tion to a template fi le for future use. You can also generate a report of the results
for review. See Figure 7.6 for a partial preview.
FIGURE 7.6 One portion of the extensive calculation report
The Shaft Component Generator dialog box's Design tab, shown in Figure 7.7,
uses a list of shaft elements and special treatments to develop the geometry of
the shaft. Let's go over a few of the special items in the dialog box.