Building the Foundation of the Design - Autodesk Inventor 2010: No Experience Required - page 52

It's About the Design
When people use Autodesk Inventor, they don't use it for the sake of using
Inventor. It's used as a means to create the products that they and their employer
will build. In this way, the design software is simply a tool. Traditionally, topics
about a software package have focused on the software's tools rather than how
they're used as part of the process creating a product.
In this topic, I want to introduce tools that are needed to build components as
you need them. Because of the type of product you'll be building, I'll introduce a
number of tools a little later that most topics would teach fi rst. Other tools are
often used at the beginning of a part, but I'll instead use them to add detail.
When defi ning your assembly, the fi rst component you place in the assembly
should be the component you would typically grab off the shelf and attach things
to. This component is referred to as the base component . It's possible to change
the base component of an assembly, but more often than not your choice of the
base component will be from your experience and therefore correct. If you keep a
realistic assembly process in mind, the functions that Inventor uses to defi ne the
relationships between parts will be easier to understand and perform more reli-
ably as you edit the assembly. Sometimes, using planes or axes that run through
the part is the easiest way to properly locate an object. This is particularly useful
if you're using a technique referred to as middle-out to defi ne a component that
connects two or more parts you've already placed in the assembly.
Most users don't create individual parts; they create assemblies of parts. That
is why Autodesk Inventor was written with the assembly in mind. The size and
complexity of assemblies may vary, but at their core they're collections of com-
ponents that are fastened, welded, or in some other way stuck together.
With this brief introduction, let's begin the process of building your fi rst com-
ponent and developing a design in Inventor.
Creating the Sheet Metal Housing
Most topics and tutorial about Inventor start with parts that are created using
Extrude or Revolve features. Because this topic's intent is to follow a more reason-
able workfl ow, you'll begin with the type of component that is best for your design.
First, you need to defi ne how the feature will be created.
Sketching Tools
Just as assemblies are made up of components, components are made up of fea-
tures. There are two types of features: sketched and placed . A sketched feature is