Bolted Connection on a circular surface

[e_paquette]

I know this topic/thread has been done before but I am hoping something has changed in the last few years. I am modeling a bulkhead designed and built in the 50's with the intention of using UT measuring to determine actual section widths. Then I update the model and see how it will react under load after 60 years of deterioration.

The problem is that the whole thing is basically bolted together. Just a rough count gives me over 700 planes I would need to create that are tangent to the surface for my starting plane and termination plane. So I would very much appreciate it if that line of advice is skipped over. I've modeled a couple planes and did a circular pattern, however, my end result is planes that don't line up exactly and are roughly 0.03 degrees off in some locations.

Is there anyway with Inventor 2014 to create a bolt through two concentric surfaces without having to create to parallel faces?

I have attached my files. Any better way to do this?

[swalton]

I am not entirely happy with this, but I did not spend much time on it.   It should give you some ideas.

Are you trying to use the bolted connection generator?  If so, it looks like it requires planer faces in your model to work correctly.  I used two workplanes and a set of patterns of patterns to get the holes in the outer part.  

I made a sketch to locate the 1st and last holes of one cell of bolts.  I used reference dims on the sketch to drive to feature patterns in the stiffener ring part.  I created a workplane at the end of a radius from the layout sketch and used a sketch at that point to create a hole feature. 

I was not sure if you wanted the bolt pattern to be the same between each set of ribs or not.  The inner two spaces are different from the outer ones.  You can either repeat my method for the inner cells or adjust the dims and pattern counts to get all the holes you need.

Once you get the holes the way you want in the stiffeners, you can project the layout info into sketches in the skin plate.  Use the same construction methods there to build its holes.

I placed some SHCS in the assembly to show how the proper use of feature patterns to drive component patterns means that I only had to constrain 2 of the 256 bolts in the assembly.

[e_paquette]

I saw what you did and it is basically a work around for a function that should exist with the bolted connection tool. It looks like you didn't use the bolted connection when placing the bolts so it didn't create a corresponding hole in the skinplate. I think this may be the way to go but it is still very time intensive.

You can see with the large number of bolts I am dealing with, having to contruct that many planes for the bolts gets tedious and time consuming very quickly even with the patterning options available.