West Coast Drive: Bellypan

[Dave McLaughlin]

Originally Posted by Gray Adams

Once you have your pocketing pattern designed and applied in CAD, layout the electronics in an assembly the way you want them in an assembly. "Edit" the bellypan without "Open"ing it. This should cause everything else to become partially transparent and not selectable. Create a sketch on one side of your bellypan, and then go to the "Project Geometry" tool. Now when you mouseover the edges of all the parts in the assembly, they will light up, and selecting them will project that edge onto your sketch. You're essentially tracing all of your electronics. From there, go ahead and draw lines where you want them, close loops so the Inventor sketch doctor doesn't complain, and then extrude your tabs/outlines/whatever you just designed to mount electronics.

Little tabs at each corner are nice, but I like making a border for the entire component. It's cooler to look at when there's nothing on it.

Be mindfull and take care when using this method as you are creating cross part geometry and dependence. This can be no problem at all, but if the referenced part is modified or removed your very likely to encouter difficulties with constraints and missing reference geometry.

I would reccomend a more time consuming, but more stable method in which you do not project geometry and instead insert the tabs and thru holes for mounting in a seperate sketch from the truss pattern. In this sketch either measure or look up the mounting hole patterns and geometry for the hardware you're including and manually set the spacing for your holes with a dimensioned sketch.