Help with 2014 inventor?!

[Anonymous]

Hi im looking for some help to carry out an assembly with the same parts but with different lengths.

I am drawing up pallet racking and within a drawing the frames can be different lengths. I have applied ilogic to the frame and created a form from which the length can be changed. However i cant get the frames to have different lengths. I know i could just create a copy of the file outside the assembly and then place it into the assembly however i would rather not work in this way because i would end up with a massive amount of parts on the system.

Thanks in advance.. 

[cbenner]

Welcome!

First a few posting thoughts:  Your title says Help with Inventor 2014... but this might be too general.  I always recommend new people tell us what version of Inventor... but I think in this case you might have needed more.  I think a lot of people shied away form your post because they don't use 2014... but this question also applies to Inventor in general.  Might have said something like Help with Variable length assembly?... or something like that.

Anyway... just my humble opinion. 

As to the actual question... have you looked into i-assemblies?

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the advice!

Yes sort of but im unsure how to get it going right?

The first image is what the full assembly will be like and then this will be patterened. It is the uprights of the frame that will be changing. It is one part that i hope to be able to change each time.

[PaulMunford]

ALL Inventor techniques create lots of files on disk! 😉

As far as I am aware there is no way of using the same part more than once with changes in Inventor -  (prove me wrong people - please!).

iAssemblies create part files 'on the fly' or when they are set up. iLogic parts need to be copied and so on.

For this task, I recommend that you look into the frame generator. It too will create lots of parts on disk, but it will be quick and parameteric!

Let us know how you get on.

Paul,

[Anonymous]

I looked into frame generator but it wasnt working out for me. In the end up i just created one assembly with copied frame files and used ilogic to produce dropdown lists / forms for each frame to select any dimension. Any frames not in use are then suppressed. Its not the best way to do it but it works!

Thanks for the help..