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Best practices for hole pattern for a rectangular flange
Best practices for hole pattern for a rectangular flange
Howdy!
Just curious what everyone's best practice is for when they do a hole pattern on a rectangular flange.
There's a few methods I can think of, but I'm not happy with any of them.
A. Create a hole, then use a feature pattern for LxW, but suppress all the holes that aren't in the perimeter
B. Create a hole, then pattern the feature along a "curve".
C. Create a linear pattern of the hole twice, then mirror across the diagonal.
The pros/cons I have with each approach:
A. Not scalable if the flange shape changes. Time consuming to manually pick all internal holes. Excellent for placing fasteners on to the pattern. Allows for different x/y spacing.
B. Doesn't allow for different x/y spacing. Easy to place. Difficult to automate so that you have a hole in every corner, and if you don't do this the pattern is just silly. Excellent for placing fasteners on the pattern.
C. Simple to create the features. Annoying as hell when you start placing fasteners!!!
So, what's everyone's best practice? I'd really love to discover something new here... 🙂
Cheers!
-KB
Blair Stunder seemed to be suggesting that there would be too many bolts as the flange got smaller or too few as it got bigger, but isn't the problem with the pattern that the occurrences that need to be suppressed change when the number of holes changes, and the method he suggested has a fixed quantity.
Edited by: dan_inv09 on Jan 30, 2009 5:15 PM
It sounds like the flanges are 100% custom so you can have a couple if iPart sizes that get welded to the hoppers as needed.
For infinitely variable, created on the fly, often changed during the design, based off a base assembly or copied machine, I would recommend going with the 4 separate patterns.
This would meet you scalablity needs, keep your current calculations for size in place, and only require the placement of 3 extra bolts once (or only a few times).
For a rectangular pattern, I think the supression formulas may have been in a linked excel spreadsheet. "If" statements were used to determine if the hole was in a starting or ending row. I think the spreadsheet was limited to prestablished maximum X and Y hole pattern vaules. This way the matrix could be sized smaller without any issue, but not greater. There might be a way to make the matrix dynamic in excel, but I think that would require a forced recaculation from Inventor.
For example, if you have a flange with 8 holes on one side, and 3 holes on the other side. If you go thru and suppress the middle hole for all middle instances (6x), but then increase your flange size so that you require 8holes x 4 holes, then you would manually return to suppress the extra 6 middle holes.
On the model itself, it doesn't likely appear as a problem because the middle holes won't be visible (if you weren't to suppress the instances). However, once you pattern fasteners to this pattern, all the "middle holes" will drive the pattern and inflate your qty.
You should be able to copy part with the 4 patterns many times. This should also be easy for others to use without difficulty and it would automatically update. This is the simplest.
Sorry... I thought you wanted a solution??? Why would I waste
my time on somthing you might not be able to open.
-- Dennis Jeffrey, Autodesk Inventor Certified
Expert Autodesk Manufacturing Implementation Certified
Expert. Instructor/Author/Sr. App Engr. AIP 2008 SP2, AIP 2009-SP1
PcCillin AV HP zv5000 AMD64 2GB - Geforce Go 440, Driver: .8185 XP
Pro SP3, Windows XP Silver Theme
href="http://teknigroup.com">http://teknigroup.com
Sorry... I thought you wanted a solution??? Why would I
waste my time on somthing you might not be able to open.
-- Dennis Jeffrey, Autodesk Inventor Certified
Expert Autodesk Manufacturing Implementation Certified
Expert. Instructor/Author/Sr. App Engr. AIP 2008 SP2, AIP 2009-SP1
PcCillin AV HP zv5000 AMD64 2GB - Geforce Go 440, Driver: .8185 XP
Pro SP3, Windows XP Silver Theme
href="http://teknigroup.com">http://teknigroup.com
-- Dennis Jeffrey, Autodesk Inventor Certified
Expert Autodesk Manufacturing Implementation Certified
Expert. Instructor/Author/Sr. App Engr. AIP 2008 SP2, AIP 2009-SP1
PcCillin AV HP zv5000 AMD64 2GB - Geforce Go 440, Driver: .8185 XP
Pro SP3, Windows XP Silver Theme
href="http://teknigroup.com">http://teknigroup.com
I come from the future and I have bad news. It's 2023 and such a feature has still not been implemented.
I currently use pretty much the strategy C which you have described but it's indeed not practical, as it need some 5 features (hole, pattern X, Pattern Y, Mirror X, Mirror Y), what could have been just a hole and a pattern.
A "perimeter pattern" would be excellent.
The issue with the sketch workflow from Josh is that newly added center points will not get a hole until you edit the hole feature.
You probably should have started a new discussion thread with a link back to this ancient thread for reference.
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----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Autodesk Inventor 2019 Certified Professional Autodesk AutoCAD 2013 Certified Professional Certified SolidWorks Professional
