A tale of success: Threaded Nut Rivets in Content Center, with AutoDrop

[Mathias_CompC]

Once upon a time, in a Content Center quite, quite near.

We tried to set up nut rivets, but the system wouldn't hear.

We tested them as Nuts, and we tested them as Pins.

And no matter what, the drop, wasn't in.

In a final attempt at victory, with sanity so thin,

We tried something listlessly, and now the Nut is in.

Jokes aside, I've been working with restructuring and improving our iLogic libraries, and with that our Content Center, I just wanted to share this story to anyone looking at a similar task. Once I got the hang of authoring Fasteners it was quite nice to use them in their intended fashion with working AutoDrop and so on.

When I got to our Threaded Nut Rivets I was at a loss, and to be honest, google didn't really make it any clearer.

It's a hybrid between a Rivet and a Nut, Rivets don't AutoDrop, so I guess it's a Nut then, most commonly, a Round one.

I modelled it as a combination of every type of Nut Rivet we use, and then I proceeded to suppress features accordingly.*Image#1

It's all going dandy, Authored it as I would any other nut. Set up Family properties and an initial table of members. This will be great - he thought in his blissful ignorance - and tried "Place from Content Center".

Oh boy, the model proceeded to, in the cases where it actually worked, mate to the outside of the surface... obviously, a nut has no reason to occupy space inside a hole. drats... 

Ok, Google. Yup, not first. But also, not really a solution to be found.

I don't care to admit how dumb I felt, and my first, second, and probably third solution were all equally dumb. One of my final attempts was to reverse the iMate, and that's when the paint started to stick to the wall.

After taking a vacation and coming back I think I made it so wrong it's almost right. Well, at least it works. 🙂

Solution:

The surface that is either mated to or flush with the mounting face is constrained to the XZ-plane, any Flange is on the opposite side of the body.

After any and all geometry is established we extrude cylinder at origin along the Y-axis, for d0.02xl0.01mm with an even smaller square shaped revolution cut *image#0

The trick is, when authoring we set both iInsert type iMates to the vertex at the XZ-plane with the "wrong" direction of the mate(towards the nut rivet).

Now we have working AutoDrop for a family of 335 members containing several types of Threaded Rivet Nuts, and so far, it actually works quite well. Worth noting is the reverse thinking with the nominal diameter, we want to match the diameter, not the thread.

I hope it help someone, somewhere.

 Image#0, The Cheat

NutRivet-The cheat

Image#1, Everything, the mess

NutRivet-All of it

Red "stick" is unmounted length

Green band is min-max grip length. If the red band is visible on the backside in the assembly, you need a shorter one.