CAD?

[delsaner]

Things I would like to emphasize, through personal experience:

1) Practice is important, as other people have mentioned. Make sure students are familiar with all of the modeling functions within whatever program you are using (I am just going to use Autodesk products for the sake of simplicity). Extrusion, Hole, Sketching, Constraining, all of that jazz. It will make sure students do not become overwhelmed with seemingly difficult parts to model.


2) Organization is CRITICAL in order to avoid problems. Inventor really likes when you keep files where they were and not moved around over the course of the build season. If your students need to move a file, have them save a copy as a part or assembly and save it to wherever necessary; even then you are at the risk of having path issues (Inventor loads a part from a certain file, but cannot find the file because it has moved).

If you are using the Autodesk Vault program (not sure if it is free or not), all of what I said can be avoided. Loading files and creating files in the vault, Inventor will not care about pathing.


3) Efficiency is important, and this one I would like to emphasize because I wished I could have when I was on the team. Within designing a machine, changes will happen constantly, and you want to change the model as quickly as possible. It is not efficient for it to take a half an hour to change a mounting plate. If you can simplify the way something is modeled, I high suggest doing it (situation permitting). There is a really big difference between being able to CAD and being able to CAD well. Here are some ways that I have found out to be efficient.

One way to do this is set as many dimensions as functions as you can. Minimize the amount of hand changed dimensions as you can. Here is a simplified example: If you make a square, you would have to dimension all four sides. Instead, you can dimension two sides (x and y), and then dimension the opposing sides as functions of the already dimensioned. That way, changing one dimension will change two instead.


Take what you want from this post. It is a lot of information, so take it one step at a time. The last thing you want to do is overwhelm/stress your sub team. This should be a fun experience for them (and you) to learn about modeling. I wish you luck on your endeavor. If I can think of anything else, I will edit my post.


tl;dr: Be prepared, be familiar with your program, be organized with your parts, be efficient with your modeling, and most importantly, have fun and make sure you are learning.