Inventor 101 - Editing

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By now you should know some of the basics of getting started in Inventor (if you’ve read my older blogs). Now we’ll look at editing your files.

Smart sketching is key here. KYSS or Keep Your Sketches Simple. You are not limited to the number of sketches in your part, but you are limited to the number of entities in your sketches. Unfortunately, I do not have the exact number, but if and when you hit this limit, Inventor will not allow you to enter another sketch-related entity. In my experience, the only time I’ve hit this limit is during Title Block creation (I’ll be covering that topic in a future post).

If you hit this limit in your part sketching process, your sketches are too complicated. You need to simplify them. Practice KYSS wherever and whenever you can. Simple sketches are more stable and far easier to understand and edit, especially when you’re not the one who created the sketch.

Side story (I’m Irish, I like to tell stories – thanks Grandpa O’): A few years back I had a designer who was assigned an edit task to a rather complicated part created by one of our power users. Based on the modifications needed, it should have taken all of 4-5 hrs. to complete, including the updates to the drawing file.

The portion of the edit was created with a more advanced process than the user was used to. Aside from the user not asking for help or clarification, he deleted the features and remodeled them from scratch. This, of course, turned the 5-hour edit into what ended up being a 5-day edit. What made matters worse was he also didn’t make the edits correctly in the model and literally manually edited the dimensions on the drawing to make it look correct. He was terminated at that point, but I digress.

The moral of the story is KYSS – Keep Your Sketches Simple, because you never know who will get those edits nor what their skill set is.

Who hasn’t been tasked with editing a part they created years ago, looking at what you created and how you created such, and think to yourself “what the heck was I thinking?”. Your processes will improve as you learn the better, more efficient ways of doing such.

In this case, let’s look at editing our part used in my previous blog (Inventor 101 – “Knock, knock, knock….Housekeeping!” Day 2). The first feature has been named “MidSection”. It involves only one sketch, thus really no reason to rename this sketch. Note how this sketch is very basic, including only the needed outline of this section of the Base. The Chamfer for this section is added later in the model as a feature.

Other than having named and simple, basic Sketches/Features, is the use of the End of Part marker (EOP). This EOP can be moved up or down and basically stops the “building” of the part to where it resides in the browser tree, suppressing the features below.

Best practice when editing is to move this EOP marker up to just below the Feature you need to work on. To move the EOP marker, Left Mouse Button select it, holding the mouse button down, move the marker up to the Feature of interest:

Notice how the only Features you see now are those above the EOP marker, simplifying your editing process by suppressing any features associated with the feature being edited, avoiding having an error notice pop up each time you finish a process of your edit.

In this example we’ll change the Width of the base from 55mm to 75mm:

Once your edit to the Feature is completed, select the EOP marker and move it down the browser tree one feature at a time and allow those features to update accordingly. If an edit is extreme enough to where the associated features below the edit can’t automatically update, you’ll then get the error pop-up at which point you can start editing as required. Repeat the process.

Now, if you know these edits will not adversely affect the following features, you are more than welcome to move the EOP marker to the very end and allow the file to rebuild. Even if you don’t know for sure, you can move the EOP and see what errors happen, move the EOP up to the first error, and adjust accordingly.

Let’s face it, no one likes to do rework. Rework adds extra time to a project that may very well have a hard due date. Rework can be very, very expensive depending on the project’s terms, this rework directly hits the bottom line.

Spending the time upfront to keep things simple, clearly identified, and easily editable, rework will be minimized.