Ticks on cylinder perimeter

[grubba]

How would you go about creating ticks ( 360 major/minor angle) ticks around the perimeter of a cylinder (extruded circle - think hokey puck)?

Thanks!

[DesignerGuy1]

Short answer (and I hope it helps), cut one tick into the cylinder, and the do a circular pattern, using the single tick as the feature to be patterned, and the cylinder as the cylindrical reference.  Should be able to tell it you want 360 occurences equally spaced at 360° (or 360 spaced 1° apart, not currently looking at the tool to know for sure which you get to tell it).

This will be most easily done if you are trying to do it on the top flat face of the cylinder - you can just place the first tick on that flat face.  If it goes on the cylindrical face of the cylinder, you may have to create a workplane on the outer face (create worklane > select origin plane > select outer face of cylinder). 

Creating the workplane will allow you to sketch on a plane that is parallel to the origin plane of the part, and tangent to the cylindrical face.  I prefer this methond because it seems to me to be the easiest way to create a tangent work plane that will move if the diameter of the cylinder changes, without having to know your parameter names to enter an equation for the workplane offset.

EDIT:  Posted a screenshot of what I was talking about, top face is the multitude of white ticks (360 instances over 360°) and the cylindrical face shows red diamonds (30 instances over 360°).

[Curtis_Waguespack]

Hi grubba,

The attached file should give you some ideas, I'm sure others can think of other approaches.

You didn't mention what version of Inventor you're using, so this is an Inventor 2010 file.

I hope this helps.

Best of luck to you in all of your Inventor pursuits,

Curtis

http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com/

[DesignerGuy1]

Curtis, are you following me?

[dan_inv09]

Circular Pattern?

Make a tick, pattern it 360 times 360 degrees around the center (or  incrementally 1 degree apart).

Make another, a little bigger, over the first one (or just an extension to it) and copy that 72 times around 360 degrees (or incrementally 10 degrees).

Over the first one again even bigger, and 36 times.

Of course with 468 things patterned around it, it is really going to test your computer - put this all last on the part and roll up the EOP above it until you are absolutely sure you need it (any edit to anything above it in the tree will cause it to recalculate all of them all over again). I find it helpful to wait until I'm about to need a bathroom break or something before generating a pattern of even 20 or 30.

Hopefully you will be able to get by with a bitmap texture. It might be hard to get exactly 360 but it should get the idea across.

[edit: Wow I type slow.]

[Curtis_Waguespack]

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@DesignerGuy1 wrote:

Curtis, are you following me?

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Trying, but you're too quick for me!

[Curtis_Waguespack]

Dan's reply concerning the high number of pattern instances, made me think that it might be best to create a pie shape and create the ticks on it, and then pattern the pie piece. Here're an example. I'm using a smaller number of ticks to keep the file size down. I suppose using the EOP of zipping the file would have worked too.

I hope this helps.

Best of luck to you in all of your Inventor pursuits,

Curtis

http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com/

[grubba]

Between this and Curtis' suggestion I got it. Curtis, I wish I could do a Vulcan mind meld thingy and skip this learning curve! I've gone through your books, I think I got a good grip on things by now. But every new thing that comes up finds me staring at the screen and going: wtf?

Thanks a zillion to both of you.

P.S. Using Inventor 2012.
P.P.S. Entering this through an iPad. You can't scroll the input text area! No idea if what I wrote above is nonsensical.

[dan_inv09]

Within the part, patterning the pattern still results in the same complexity. However, an assembly can be much quicker - make those pie pieces parts and pattern them. [But if you try to be tricky and derive that assembly into a single part it goes right back to being a resource hog. We we're playing with someone's ..., I forget if it was a radiator or an expanded metal grate, a year or so ago.]