Inventor 2017: Top down Design / Jig design - Advice required

[mjc_design]

I am hoping the hive mind can give me some tips on a little project I am working on.

I need to create a jig that will support and roughly locate a number of engine casings, with spherical ended pegs contacting various internal faces. Hopefully the attached scribble will give a rough idea of what i'm doing (!).

My plan is to create an assembly, and use a sketch and work geometery to position the casings.

Next I was thinking I would create some spheres, and use tangent constraints to position these on the internal faces.

Then I would derive this assembly into a part, which would give me the position of locating pegs which I can use to drive the design of the Jig.

I'm worried about cyclical dependencies, so will probably have to supress the link to the casing (I will need to produce a concept 3d model showing the casing and jig together).

If what I wrote above is even slightly understandable, does this sound like the best way to do what I want? I was really struggling to find away of using the casing geometry that I have, as a way of driving the peg positioning.

sergio.bertino has edited your subject line (Top down Design / Jig design - IV2017 Advice required) for clarity.

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! You can definitely use Derive workflow to do that. Also, you could consider using in-context design workflow, called Copy Object (adaptive). Insert a new part to the assembly constrained to origin. Go to Modify tab -> expand it -> Copy Objects -> pick the geometry you want from the casting. The geometry will be linked to the casting part. Would it work too?

Many thanks!

[cmcconnell]

You could also derive your casting into a part as a surface. Create sketches in this new part to create and control all of the necessary parts for your assembly. Each new part would be derived from this "Master" part file referencing only the sketches needed to define their features.

This would be considered Master Sketch or Skeletal modelling.