I make boxes using a Laser cutter out of a variety of materials - plastic, plywood, wood, mdf. These raw materials all vary in their thicknesses.
I would like to use an Inventor workflow that allows me to modify one (or maybe a couple more) values to use the same part and assembly files (based on a given box's width, height, and depth), and then create an output .pdf or .dxf or .dwg or ? that I will import to CorelDraw (.cdr) for printing to the Laser cutter.
My present workflow:
1. I use the following URL to create a .pdf file for the box design:
http://boxmaker.rahulbotics.com/
I am attaching an example file for a 4" x 5" x 6" box that uses a 1/4" material thickness.
Attached filename is 456 one quarter thick box.pdf
2. I import the .pdf into CorelDraw or Adobe Illustrator to "tweak" the design as necessary for symmetry, etc.
3. I export the drawing to a .dwg format. I am using CorelDraw 5 for this example - it has various versions of Autocad to export as: 2000, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and some older ones. I have been exporting as 2008.
The attached example file for this is 456 Box Output to DWG.dwg
4. I open the .dwg in Inventor 2012.
5. I copy the sketch of one of the 6 sides of the box to a new part file. For my question here, I will focus on only one of the sides. For some reason, CorelDraw seems to leave some "noise" along the lines (see attached file noise.jpg). Because of this, I have to do a bit of trickery.
6. I extrude the noisy sketch and then save the face as a fresh file. I then import this into a new part file which has no noise.
7. And here's where I have trouble. I would like to edit the tab length with very few steps. I attempted to use Constraints, but received an error that the drawing would be over-constrained.
Any ideas on how to approach this?
Thank you in advance,
Tom
@ToGo1919, are you related to boxmaker.rahulbotics.com?
Why don't you create your own Inventor models? With iLogic you can create a part that reads some user input for the width, height etc. and create the box without the use of the pdf.
Do you have Inventor experience?
Rob.
I'm very new to Inventor. Let me experiment with iLogic and see if it goes where I'm hoping.
Thank you for the idea!
TG