Boss placement: open profile

[newcomer]

I put four points on my drawing where I want the bosses to be placed.  Essentially 10mm from the outer edges of a 4mm-wall shell.  I placed them, I think, on the inside of the shell (what I have is the bottom part of a case to hold my readout data display).  I have a cover that is going to go on the top.  So I wanted to place a boss thread on the case, and the corresponding inserts in the cover.  But when I try to place the bosses inside the case, I got a sequence of messages that ended with "Boss1: Could not build this boss/Profile is not closed".  I have no idea what it means.  I have read about profiles far too long this evening, and not one thing I have learned has appeared to have the slightest relevance or, which it appeared they might, the slightest effect.  I'm just learning this program, and it has been a remarkably difficult task--far more difficult than it should be for someone who is quite good at 2D drawing editing.  So any help would be appreciated.

The problem with many of the tutorials is that they start with a problem more complex than I have, show how to solve the far more complex problem, and somehow, from that, I'm expected to extract the basic principles that will let me accomplish the same thing in what appears to be a trivial subcase.  So all the examples I found dealt with irregular geometries, requiring a work plane be placed to do anything; I have a simple case of a flat surface on which I want to place four bosses.  Then I will need to go to the cover and put the mating part in.  It should not be this hard.

thank you

joseph m. newcomer

[newcomer]

More information.

The previous post was for Inventor 2013.  I have Inventor 2014 at home, so I can't move between the two platforms (a serious inconvenience).

So I tried a simple rectangle.  I extruded it  backwards from the plane of the sketch.  I then went back to the sketch, added four points, and tried to add a set of four bosses on the points.  Now, I can't imagine a simpler shape than a rectangle drawn with the rectangle tool.  It has to be a closed profile.  But the error message is the same: Profile is not closed.  What profile?  There is only a rectangle, which is extruded in the opposite direction that I'm projecting the bosses. 

I'm still trying to figure out from the convoluted examples of solving gratuitously complex problems what the essence of the solution is, but it is now 2:30am here, and I can no longer stay awake long enough to experiment.  Twelve hours of struggling, and not one single drawing for the 3D printer!  And this is just in an attempt to add a few features to a drawing that has already printed.

[JDMather]

I hate to tell you that almost everything you have done - you have done incorrectly and made too much work for yourself.

I'll come back in a while with a finished solution, in the meantime I recommend you go through these.

http://home.pct.edu/~jmather/SkillsUSA%20University.pdf
http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com/p/inventor-tutorials.html
http://wikihelp.autodesk.com/enu?adskContextId=HELP_TUTORIALS&language=ENU&release=2014&product=Inve...

[JDMather]

Open the attached file. (r2014)

Find the red End of Part marker in the browser.

Drag the red EOP down step-by-step to see how I created a similar part(s) (actually a multi-body solids).

Post back if you have trouble getting your parts.

[newcomer]

It is not surprising I have any number of things wrong; this is my first Inventor project, and I was basing it on what I learned in the Techshop "Introduction to Inventor" class, so I had little on which to base my assumptions about drawing.

I looked at a couple of the references, but they didn't help much, so I'm first going to see what you sent me later, and work backwards from that to figure out what I should have done.

thank you

joe

[newcomer]

Alas, I opened your email at Techshop, where they only have 2013.