Trouble extruding part

[austonwerner]

I am trying to extrude the outter shell and leave the center as a hole. Any help. I am not a full time user of this program, and I am self tought so far.

[brendan.henderson]

Basically you sketch is in need of some work. There are some self intersecting loops which is the basis of your problem. Start the Extrude and then use the red cross to help identify the problem. Fix that and do the Extrude again. Once that is done the Extrude works but there are other problems. You have 2 lines in the sketch that are atatched to nothing, and the sketch is not fully constrained.

[coreyparks]

You need to think differently when creating sketches.  Try to break them down a bit more to make them easier to handle .  Look into using Sketch constraints to make lines and arcs equal to other lines and arcs as well as making things horizontal/vertical or co-linear to one another.  Cut down on your use of dimensions, if you wanted to change a hole size you would need to change 4 dimensions, not good.  The attached zip shows roughly how the part was built and you can see the use of dimensions was minimal compared to the mess you had on your drawing.  I also attached the Inventor file but I noticed after I did this that you appear to be using Inventor 2013 and I am on 2014 and you won't be able to open it without 2014.

[TrentMayberry3]

As was stated above breaking down a sketch to make it easier to work with is by far your best shot. I'm fairly new to Inventor as well, and it seems you made the same mistake I did starting out on Inventor, which is sketching it out like it's on AUTOCAD. I learned very fast Inventor was not made for that. If you're able to sketch that out on AUTOCAD actually, then you could use 3D Modeling and extrude it as is directly from there, without too much hastle.

[Curtis_Waguespack]

Hi austonwerner,

Just to add to what the others have said, here is a link that illustrates the benefits of simple sketches with parametric modelers such as Autodesk Inventor:

http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com/2011/03/inventor-101-simple-fully-constrained.html

I hope this helps.
Best of luck to you in all of your Inventor pursuits,
Curtis
http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com

[austonwerner]

So what's the easiest way to make this without deleting everything I've done?

[austonwerner]

So I did it the way someone mentioned

Now I just need help rounding a few corners

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! If you want to create round corners on the solid, you can use Fillet command or create a new sketch to cut the corners. If you want to create round corners in the sketch consumed by the extrusion, you can use Sketch Fillet command.

Thanks!

[JDMather]

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@austonwerner wrote:
So what's the easiest way to make this without deleting everything I've done?

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I always recommend to my students that they start over - using what the learned from first attempt.

Turn on the visibility of the Origin Center Point.

Edit Sketch1.

Note that you have two dimensions in Sketch1 where only one dimension is needed (make the vertical line equal (=) constraint to the horizontal line.

Note that the origin center point is not located in a logical symmetrical location within the sketch.  (I would have used a centerpoint rectangle or polygon.)  Your part has a lot of obvious symmetry - you can use this symmetry to dramaticaly reduce the amout of work required to generate the geometry.

I recommend that you read this

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...

[austonwerner]

Thank you. I did end up starting over and it worked out much easier.
I'll try rounding those corners too.