Cylinder mock-ups of gears in Inventor?

[Doug G]

There are some great gear models at www.firstcadlibrary.com or www.cbliss.com, but I've found out that it's just simpler to represent gears as cylinders using their pitch diameters - this allows inventor to run faster if you have a slower machine. Our first year of using inventor, we modeled everything down to the gear teeth and even the slots on the 8020. In the end, our model approached 1.5 GB and normally would take 10 minutes to load in - if the computer didn't crash first.