Wait...weight...weight!!!!

[Greg Perkins]

Howdy,

So I have seen many teams pulling their hair out because of weight, here's a easy way to avoid these problems in the design phase....

In Inventor....use the IProperties feature!!!! When you are creating a part right click on the part in the feature browser on the left. Then go to the "physical" tab, where you can select a material, and it will also give you the mass of the part.

Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Step 4

If your working in an assembly, and would like to see what the entire assembly weighs (NOTE**** this is never 100% perfect, use this feature to see wether or not your close) do this:

Double click each part individually, and follow step 1-4 above on each part to assign a property to them. Once all parts have a material, return to the assembly, and right click on the assembly (similar to step 1) and then go to Iproperties, which then you go to the physical tab and hit "update". This will give you an calculated total weight of all components. Remember this is not correct.

Now what about a part (IE. KOP parts) that are assemblies in themselves?? well you can convert the part into a lb. mass and input the mass in the physical tab of that part. and instead of having a material, you just give the mass.

I hope this helps some of the rookies who have not used inventor before, or anyone else who did not know how to use Inventor's Mass properties tool.

[Peter Matteson]

Using this method works well I used to do it all the time when I did regular design work. It's a bit different in Pro/E though.

[Greg Perkins]

Maybe you could enlighten the rest of the CD community on how Pro-E can calculate mass. I'm sure there are teams on here that would love to know

[Peter Matteson]

Sorry, I didn't even think of it at the time.

To calculate mass properties in Pro/E Wildfire 2.0
Edit > Setup... > Mass Props
Enter the density of the material which can be obtained from www.matweb.com or "Machinery's Handbook".

Then go to Analysis > Model Analysis
The default should be model mass properties. Click compute and it will give you the mass provided you have assigned density to all the components in the assembly otherwise it will ask you for there densities at this time. It will also show you the center of gravity (CG) which is very important in preventing tipping.