Would like to use tabs whose dimensions must change based on material thickness

[ToGo1919]

I make boxes using a Laser cutter out of a variety of materials - plastic, plywood, wood, mdf.  These raw materials all vary in their thicknesses.

I would like to use an Inventor workflow that allows me to modify one (or maybe a couple more) values to use the same part and assembly files (based on a given box's width, height, and depth), and then create an output .pdf or .dxf or .dwg or ? that I will import to CorelDraw (.cdr) for printing to the Laser cutter.

My present workflow:

1. I use the following URL to create a .pdf file for the box design:
http://boxmaker.rahulbotics.com/
I am attaching an example file for a 4" x 5" x 6" box that uses a 1/4" material thickness.
Attached filename is 456 one quarter thick box.pdf

2. I import the .pdf into CorelDraw or Adobe Illustrator to "tweak" the design as necessary for symmetry, etc.

3. I export the drawing to a .dwg format. I am using CorelDraw 5 for this example - it has various versions of Autocad to export as: 2000, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and some older ones. I have been exporting as 2008.

The attached example file for this is 456 Box Output to DWG.dwg

4. I open the .dwg in Inventor 2012.

5. I copy the sketch of one of the 6 sides of the box to a new part file. For my question here, I will focus on only one of the sides.  For some reason, CorelDraw seems to leave some "noise" along the lines (see attached file noise.jpg).  Because of this, I have to do a bit of trickery.

6. I extrude the noisy sketch and then save the face as a fresh file. I then import this into a new part file which has no noise.

7. And here's where I have trouble.  I would like to edit the tab length with very few steps.  I attempted to use Constraints, but received an error that the drawing would be over-constrained.

Any ideas on how to approach this?

Thank you in advance,

Tom

[VdVeek]

@ToGo1919, are you related to boxmaker.rahulbotics.com?

Why don't you create your own Inventor models? With iLogic you can create a part that reads some user input for the width, height etc. and create the box without the use of the pdf.

Do you have Inventor experience?

Rob.

[ToGo1919]

I'm very new to Inventor.  Let me experiment with iLogic and see if it goes where I'm hoping.

Thank you for the idea!

TG