How to make cables for a cable stayed bridge

[e.borkent]

Hello everybody,

This is my first message here, and I hope someone can help me out.

It is a while ago since I used Inventor, so i'm now just practising a bit to get the hang of it.

As a start a cable stayed bridge looked fun. So I made the towers and the roaddeck. But now comes the tricky part, and that are the cables themselves. When I started I just thought I could use the 3D sketsh feature. But as it turns out, that feature is not available in the Assembley environment. I could just make the cables as a Part and then insert them in the assembley, but that is to much work. As you can see from the pictures below the holes I made in the towers to accomodate the cables do not line up with the edge of the roaddeck on which I want to secure them. So the cables make to much angles for me to make the as a part. And besides that, I just think it could be done more easily. 

Below you can see the images I made of the bridge so far. The first one is an overall image, the second one shows the tower with the holes (if the holes won't work, I can always make something else), and the third image shows the area on which the cables will be attached to the roaddeck.

Can this be done in the Assembley environment?

I hope someone has a solution for this. 

Thanks in advance,

Erik

Note: I planned this to be a cable stayed bridge, not a suspension bridge. But tips to make this into a susension bridge are welcome as well.

For the record: I'm using Inventor 2012

[JDMather · Accepted solution]

Start a new part file.

Derive Component the bridge assembly as a surface body into the new part file.

You can now model your cables in place.

Turn off the visibility of the derived surface when finished.

Use 3 Mate Flush constraints to xy, xz and yz planes to constrain the new part in the assembly.

[e.borkent]

Thanks for your reply,. I forgot about the derive function. Now the bridge has some cables.

Erik