Perforation Area Pattern

[gahiggins]

Hello,

I am trying to apply a perforation pattern to an extruded face plate. The perforation is the .13 thru hole, stagger angle is 60 degrees, the margin is 2mm, and vertical spacing is 6mm.

Thx

[SharkDesign]

Make the hole and pattern the feature. 

Don't try and pattern the sketch.

[Cadmanto]

I agree with @gahiggins .  Create the hole feature, then pattern the feature.

If you pattern the sketch, you will have top select each sketched hole to extrude it.

Windows 10 x64 -16GB Ram
Intel i7-6700 @ 3.41ghz
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Inventor Pro 2022

[gahiggins]

I have placed four individual thru holes as the features that are to be perforated.  The idea is to perforate the faceplate 

using the least amount of steps possible, please refer to the attached files...thx

Spacing is 6mm, stagger angle is 60 or 30 degrees, margin from vertical edge is 2mm.

[JDMather]

I didn't finish this - but the Attached should give some ideas.

You can also Suppress elements of the Pattern, but I think it is easier to simply Delete them.

[SharkDesign]

I'm not exactly sure what your problem is here? Is this not just a simple pattern job?

Similar to what JD has posted.

Just pattern the lot:

I've used delete face with heal to get rid of the ones you don't want:

You can project the shape and do a 2mm border, although your first row isn't on 2mm. 

[gahiggins]

To Mr. James Willo

I would like to thank you for making me feel like a total idiot for simply posting a help question, and this is not the first time you have wised off to me. If you cannot respond to me in a constructive manner, do not respond to my posts, I am merely a student, not an expert such as yourself.

[SharkDesign]

I apologise if I came across that way. Tone of voice can be misinterpreted in text form. 

I was just asking what issue you were having with creating the holes because you hadn't stated a problem in your original post.  I wondered if I was missing something that my solution was not going to answer.

[gahiggins]

This design is basically what I was looking for.

Thx

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! I believe you are looking for Fill Pattern. At the moment, Inventor does not have the ability to automatically populate feature instances at a given spacing within a selected boundary.

The closest workflow to do that is the following.

1) Create a sketch boundary (project edges).

2) Create a center point and a rectangular pattern of the point enough to cover the boundary.

3) Select the unneeded points (outside of the boundary) and change its type to regular point (Format -> Center Mark).

4) The sketch can be used to populate Sketch Driven Pattern of selected features.

Many thanks!

[SharkDesign]

Thought I had a better solution to provide a more true grill effect with partial holes, but it turned out to be a lot more steps in practise than I thought. Either way, here's how I did it. 

Another way to do it would be to do all the holes first and then just extrude a 2mm border over the top to fill in the ones you don't want. That would be much quicker than the following. 

Note: Using extrusion for your holes will not get you a drill call out in the drawing environment. 

Another way is to extrude the holes as a new solid.

Pattern them as a new solid

Use combine to combine all the circle extrudes. (this speeds up the split command)

You can drag select and the ctrl click to get rid of the main plate

Use offset to do a 2mm border

Extrude that as a surface

Use split tool to cut your 2mm border into the holes.

Use delete face in lump mode to get rid of the extra ones. 

Finally use combine to subtract the extrusions

finished part

[gahiggins]

Yes, FILL PATTERN is exactly what I was looking for...THX

[gahiggins]

Hello Mr. Willow

Would you mind up loading the completed file..?

THX

[SharkDesign · Accepted solution]

I'll check, I might not have saved it.

I have a better method anyway. Will have a go tomorrow if I get time.

[gahiggins]

Thank you...

[SharkDesign · Accepted solution]

Offset the outline by 2mm, (you need to delete this tiny edge first)

Add in a line to close the loop

Project the main blank profile from the back to the same sketch

Pattern your holes

Extrude your border the thickness of the plate

Use delete face if you want to tidy up the partial holes (with heal mode on)