From Art to Part—Plastic Part Design with Product Design Suite

JIM SWAIN: As I was saying to when a couple of people were here earlier, my goal is to let you know what my workflow is and-- is this up a little high on the volume? What's your thoughts in the back? OK, I'm going to keep talking, but I'm just curious whether it's too much.

I'm going to give you a feel for my workflow and why. And I think honestly the "and why's" are the most important thing about this because that way you know what my assumptions were, what my constraints were, when I was doing product design and how I would use the software that's available now to do this. I'm not going to go deep into the software-- just not time to go really, really far deep into everything. But there are a few areas I'll dive deeper than others. I'll let you know where they're going to be.

And this is a session right before lunch. If you're willing to give up some food time, some time down on the exhibit floor, I'll be glad to talk with you a few more minutes, maybe fire something up here and go that way. Does that sound reasonable to everybody? OK, good. If not, I'm up here anyway.

So that's what was put out on the catalog. I was a little bit annoyed because they didn't say anywhere that I saw on the courses as far as what the assumed level of user was. Was this an advanced class? Was this a basic class? Because I did put this up there as a basic, so hopefully it meets everybody. I've got another slide hitting that too.

So we'll take a look at some workflows involving both derived parts and multibody tools. I'm going to hit multibody harder than I am derived. I need to do something here?

I was going to try to fix your ratio.

Oh did it? I think I'm OK for inventor. Let me see. Nope, we had it fixed about 5 minutes ago, probably when I switched back over to VGA.

OK, so let me just put the PowerPoint back up. If the resolution dances while we're doing that, no big deal. OK, so hitting multibody solids, part design, type of thing a little heavier-- there we go-- and do that heavier than derived parts. Talking about Moldflow Design, that's the one piece of software I'm going to hit today that's not included in Product Design Suite.

And full disclosure, yes, I work for a reseller. No, I don't get commission on software. I'm not really trying to push the software down your throat with this, but I see value in it. I want you to see why I say that, and you can decide for yourself. Say yeah, he's right or nah, we're not going to worry about it.

Showcase? Yeah, that is in Product Design Suite. I'll talk about how I would use that or do use that for doing part of my product design workflow. And then the 3D print environment.

So my name's Jim Swain. I like this. I don't have to wear a badge temporarily. I don't have that thing swinging around in front of me as I move around. So that's pretty good. I will put it on later so in case you're going, who's that again?

I'm what's called currently an Applications Consultant for a reseller with headquarters in eastern Pennsylvania. You could say Applications Engineer, Solutions Engineer, not really Software Engineer. I'm somebody that in the past, you would think of the person that goes out and would do the demo. Well, no.

I demo. I train. I support. I would consult with customers on implementations. They're basically my customer for life. So that's the way I approach things.

Before coming to Synergis, I was a design engineer for a lighting controls company. And in that job, picture a dimmer that you might go to a big box store like a Home Depot or Lowe's, and you see the one aisle that's nothing but switches and the first half, it's dimmers. Yeah, I've got some stuff in there with my patent on it. I'm kind of proud of that. We can talk later when it's not on the recording.

But a lot of plastic part, some sheet metal work, general design work went into that job. That was a good, what, seven plus years there. So design testing of the product before it goes out the door, both life testing and UL required testing.

We owned our tools, the molds for making the parts. We own them. We didn't create the tools. We didn't design the tools, but we owned them.

So as a design engineer, part of my responsibility was approving the tool design. Basically, it worked out, I wasn't the one that was figuring out gate size and type of steel to use and everything. But better know what's going into it because it was my name on the drawing. It was my name on the PO. And you can just picture what else was involved with that.

A group of us got together after a couple years and realized we're hiring a lot of people straight out of school. And those folks didn't know anything about injection molded part design. It was very different than the machine parts that they had been taught and played with in the schools.

Now, remember this was back-- oh, I didn't say it earlier, but this is probably 20 years ago. So more and more schools are now having injection molding build into a design curriculum. Oh, there you go. I got engineers disease, never use a small word when a big word will do. I'll try and keep it to a minimum in this class, but it's going to slip out.

So we developed a course in-house for teaching incoming engineers the basics of designing plastic parts. I have a couple of bits of that coming into here, not a whole lot but just a little bit. I also took that concept, work with a local community college to do a plastic part design course at the community college level. The local college was setting up a plastics program-- designing tools, designing parts, running tools, all that.

Unfortunately, it kind of fizzled. The person that was heading it passed away. And so the program kind of died with them.

So quick feedback from the audience. The pace I'm speaking, is this a reasonable pace or am I talking too fast? All right, because I got a case of the jitters. I'm in front of an audience here, so I just want to make sure that I'm not just going right through it. I don't want to be that.

If at any point you have questions, I'd like it if you could hold it to the end. But if it's something that I just showed something-- hey, can you show that again, whatever? Bring it up at that point. Fair enough?

OK, again, basic level class. I'm going to go beyond scratching the surface, but I'm not diving deep on most of these tools-- I'd say all these tools. Again, the offer's out there. If you want to go deeper afterwards, we can spend some time.

How many of you have Inventor experience? All right, pretty good. Those of you who didn't raise your hand, are you looking to go into Inventor? Or yeah, maybe. OK. Again, I don't get commission. I'm not going to push it down.

All right, how many of you have plastic part design experience already? All right, so you're just looking for a good class to catch a nap in before lunch? That's cool. Give me fives. I'm happy with that.

Hopefully, I'll show you some things that are maybe a different way of looking at it. I'll help you out that way. Besides this class-- first of all, the hand-outs got a lot more information than what I've got on my slides-- and I'm not going to death by PowerPoint-- and also more information than what I will show as far as setting up the different tools and so on in that handout.

There's also a lot of information in other AU classes out there. Inventor Flexible Modeling, I think that was on Tuesday. Getting Your Inventor Derive License, the derived part workflow was yesterday.

3D Printing with Inventor, also yesterday, and then Combining Inventor in 3D Printing in Early Prototype Development, that's this afternoon at one o'clock. So if you haven't explored deeply the 3D printing environment and you want to, there's an opportunity for you. And of course, you can go and download those handouts as well.

Help file within the Autodesk world, both for Inventor and for Moldflow Design. And there's a lot of good information there but also basic tools.

The resin manufacturers, we developed the course at Lu-- I'm not going to say the name, sorry. The company I used to work for. And even more so for the college course I did, just gleaning information from the different manufacturers' design guides for the different resins. Back then, it used to be General Electric had a wealth of design guides.

And you get a little bit of information from the VALOX. You get another little bit of information from LEXAN. You get another information-- and we just, OK, here you go. And we combined that with DuPont and with a few other manufacturers.

GE's changed, what, names three times in that 20 years since then. They don't go by GE anymore. For LEXAN, it's now SABIC or something. But they have design guides online, some really nice, interactive guides and things for the basics of plastic part design, as well as books and stuff that you can find, or other design guides or Wikipedia or YouTube and that for going beyond what we're hitting here today.

So with that being said, I'm going to talk a little bit about what the challenges are as a designer coming into having to do plastic parts. We'll take a look at the derived part workflow and the multibody part workflow. Is multibody new to anybody here?

Wow, OK, I'm going to have you guys out to lunch early because everybody knows it already. Yeah, sorry, you're going to have to sit through a little bit of it, but I'll keep it to the level that seems appropriate. If you haven't seen multibody solids where you're working inside a single part but multiple solids, hopefully, I show you something that will pique your interest because I think it's a wonderful tool for the idea of maybe designing the next mouse or the next 3D mouse or that keyboard they have down there in the exhibit hall. Did anybody play with that, the split keyboard where it's a mouse in each hand and half the keyboard in each hand?

I'm looking at that going I might be an old dog, but that looks like a good new trick to work with because I'm "ambimoustrous." I work the mouse left-handed or right-handed, and that's perfect because I already have a mouse in each hand in that case. So I'm going to look into that one.

We'll talk specifically about what tools are in Inventor for helping design things that are typical in injection molded parts-- hooks, snaps, lips, screw bosses, that kind of stuff. We'll take a look at that.

We'll look at Moldflow Design. This used to be known as Simulation DFM. Did anybody notice that I had Simulation DFM in the original catalog look-up when I was posting that back in June? I wasn't sure if that came through or if I got the correction in time.

OK, and then Showcase. 3D Environment, mentioned it before. And what hopefully is the most useful part. If I had all these tools back 20 years ago when I was doing this day in and day out for a living, or flip it around, if I was doing this now as my 8 to 12 job-- that's 8:00 the morning 12:00 at night-- what would I do? What would be my workflow?

And at that point, I'm assuming times for many, but if anybody has things that they would like to share as far as alternatives, I think that would be great for everybody. I do ask that you think about why you do it a certain way. Several of you were-- many of you were here when I was talking about that first thing with the class because that's just as important. Oh, I never use that tool. Well, why?

OK, yeah that makes sense. Or yeah, I understand it doesn't apply to what I do. So that's what I'm hoping that you can share. That's what I'm looking to share with you. OK, we're almost done with the first bit of PowerPoint, and I'm only- yeah, I'm right on time. That's scary.

So I just lined some pieces up on my desk before coming out here. We got a lid for a thermal cup. Ironically, the piece that it attaches to is an Autodesk Moldflow Users Group thermal cup that leaks because the seal doesn't hold. Hmm. I keep that just because of that.

My mouse and one of these things, as well as my keyboard and the laptop there. So injection molding, metal or plastics at this point, allow you to combine a lot of functionality within the parts. You can also get a wide range of geometries. You can do stuff in plastics that if you try to mass produce through a machining would drive you nuts.

Now, technology fast-emerging with 3D added to manufacturing, I think there's another revolution going on there. And I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying looking at that. That's taking this further. It's going to change things that I think as much as what injection molding has done. So that's kind of fun being alive right now.

Part performance, it's got to get the job done. It's got to meet the design criteria. That might be aesthetics. The aesthetics might be we got a glossy surface on the mouse versus having that pebbly surface on the thermal lid and kind of a pebbly surface on the doo-hickey. That's the multi-charger.

Net Shape, yeah, parts got to fit together. Pieces for the mouse don't work real well if the upper piece is a couple millimeters wider than the bottom piece. Not exactly what needs to happen. That's not just with design. That's also hopefully you designed it to be manufacturable and stay within that.

It's got to be strong enough. I don't know how many times this guy's hit the floor. The battery door always comes off but nothing breaks. There we go, I think that's meeting the strength requirement.

And then the biggest challenge. I worked at a relatively small company. The owner was incredibly involved with the aesthetics, the product. Things for the first month would change rapidly. You'd be taking a different prototype to-- or two or three prototypes-- to see him every night for that time frame.

Meanwhile, you're also trying to start your design so that you could meet your overall goals. Just because he didn't sign off on the aesthetic, didn't mean the delivery date had shifted. Anybody else ever run through that experience? Yeah.

Anybody else put anybody through that experience? Good-- oh, leave now you.

[INAUDIBLE].

That's true. That's true. I'll have to give you points for that.

OK, from the manufacturing end of things, tooling ain't cheap. Both to design it, it takes a skilled person to design tool, especially something that you want to have last for more than a year or two. But also the fabrication-- things changed in 20 years obviously from the economy point of view. But still, it's a very significant part of the overall piece.

But as a design engineer, it's my responsibility to make sure that the parts are going to be economical. What I have control over that? Is this going to be easy to fill? Is it going to be easy to cool? OK, that means the cycle time can come down on the pieces, therefore, the price can come down on those pieces.

Is the geometry going to be forgiving? Do I need to inspect every single top coming out of the mold to make sure it's going to fit to have a hope of having this mouse be something the customer will accept? Or nope, we've never had a part that wouldn't go together and we're never going to because that's just how forgiving the design was.

And then, we did a lot of short runs, couple thousand pieces at a time, change color, do another couple thousand pieces, so on and so on. We are in a company that would run a million pieces at a time. So the amount of time it took to get a tool up and running at the beginning of a run was a significant part of our per piece cost. So we tried to design things, and especially the tooling, but run our systems and such that would allow it to cut down on that.

What I'm going to hit mostly today, though, are those three in the middle. What can we do from a design point of view to try and keep the cost of production down?

OK, so flexible design-- no, I think we need more of a scope on that surface. Really? The electrical engineers just took a larger capacitor in there because they said the performance wasn't working. And now I got to shrink down what's going around that capacitor. Thank you very much. Never phrase that that way to my boss. I was a little smarter than that.

So Derived Part Workflow. You've got an assembly, single part, something like. I'm going to make a new part that uses that as my parent. And I'm going to have my new one as a derivative of that.

Again, kind of quick poll, derived part workflow, how many people feel they're comfortable with that right now? OK, so 3/4. All right, I'll gear what I'm going to show on the screen live towards that.

Multibodies. Multibody is great for-- again, we did one-person design teams, two-people design teams. Or if it was a larger group, each person had an area of responsibility. So I might be designing a mouse. I might be designing a handheld remote. I might be designing a faceplate or the faceplate system for a given product.

So the fact that I could have my entire design in the very beginning in a single piece yet still be able to design as if it's an assembly made up of batteries and circuit boards and battery covers and all that stuff. And that better work again now or I'm really in trouble. That multibody workflow, very handy-- and I got ahead a little bit on my slide.

What you can steal with the derived part, you can bring over information under the geometry, the solid body, the volume of the parent, whether it's one or more pieces in assembly, or just a single part that you're linking in. You can bring over sketches, have them available for you. So do you want the solid body as a dumb body, or do you want to be able to also get hold of information on the sketches?

Work features, plane-- work planes, work points, work axes, that type of stuff. Again, you can bring them into your new part, as well as the parameters. And I haven't done tests on them for a little while, but back in the earlier releases of Inventor, back before it was the year as the release name, it was definitely faster to derive something into another piece to get a hold of parameters than use Excel because the Excel links slowed down the performance. So you make one master part. Might have only parameters in it, nothing else.

And that would be derived into everything that you needed to use to get through it. I haven't tested that in a while, so I don't know if it still got that kind of constraint. But it kept Excel out of the mix.

Multibody solid parts. Well, essentially you are still working with a derived part. I'll come back to that.

Semi-independent, what I mean by that is I build this piece, it's rough shape, I split it out into separate bodies. If I come back and add some fillets or things like that, I can tell the software which of these parts that fillet's going to affect-- all of them? Only one? Some combination in between?

That's what I mean when I say semi-independent. No assembly constraints. OK, I was almost expecting smiles, or maybe even a little cheer, when I said no assembly constraints. You don't have to mess with flushes and mates and inserts and that kind of stuff for pieces to hold together while it's still just a single part file. You're building it in the right location.

Then, when you've got things to the point you're comfortable with, you can kick it out to individual part files within an assembly. I will go through that. That, to me, is great because now, I could start doing the full out detail of the piece. If you want, you can keep it linked to the original solid body in case you need to do some late aesthetic changes, things like that.

But kick it out. You've got individual parts that you can now assign specific materials to, a specific bill of material information to, component, by component, by component. So that's what I love about that multibody solid workflow. What I hate about it is it's a real mouthful to say, especially in front of an audience.

So look at it another way. And this table is in the handout as well. If you want to compare what a assembly is like compared to multibody part, in assembly, each part already has its own material made that's probably generic, whatever your template file is set to. But each part already has it. Whereas multibody part, it's got the material of that master part.

The colors, individual parts can have colors in the assembly. OK, that one is fairly obvious. You can also change the properties of individual solid bodies to have different colors while it's still within the solid part.

Constraints, as I said, you don't need them with a multibody solid. When you kick it out from being a solid into being a separate part files. They come in in that same geometric location. They're fixed. So there's still no assembly constraints, but it's a fix-- they're grounded, so they stay in their position at that point.

And then, finally, tool bodies. Tool bodies, if you're not familiar with this, the idea of maybe have two solids. And I'm going to cut away from the one with the other.

So at an assembly level, you don't really have that. I could do a derive part from the assembly and say, this piece is cutting away this one to get that same result. But at a pure assembly, you don't really have that tool body, that cut away, join the Boolean operations, don't really exist at the assembly level. You do have those at the part level. So I can make multiple solids and then cut one away from the other.

That might be how I make the cradle for the batteries in here. I have a solid body for the battery and just cut it away from the rib. And there's my support.

All right, so let's take a quick look. You're going to see these slides come up a bit. And yes, that was the platform creaking. That's a nice loose joint here, and I'm waiting-- last time I taught, I almost pushed the chair back too far. So if you see me doing a windmill, get ready to run for first aid help please.

So kick back over to Inventor. And here, I've got a part I'm going to use as a starting for a derived piece. I'll start a brand new part right off of the standard template.

Typical operation, we'll go and start a sketch. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some of you have that already sitting there in your template file, have that sketch there. Or you have it turned on to create one right away. But instead of that, I'm going to go to the derive tool.

And you can derive really at any point you want to. So that other piece that I'm going from is right hand of case. So notice I am allowed to go and derive from full cases or single parts. There's the right hand of case in my new part.

Right now, I'm bringing over the solid. If I don't want it, I click on it. The same thing applies. If I want to be able to get a hold of the sketch, I can engage that as well.

I do have work geometry in there, so I could bring over individual work planes-- maybe, that one there. And I could get a hold of model parameters. I can get hold of reference parameters. Reference parameter might be a reference dimension. So if you're wondering what the heck a reference parameter is, typically, the only place I've seen them come up is when I put a reference dimension in the sketch.

I don't have any user parameters. I don't have any linked in parameters in this particular file. If I did, those would also be available. Common use for this, you're making a mirror image part. So I can just tag that mirror, left hand part made, right hand-- boom, there it's done.

I can also use a scale factor, trying to do tool design before the tooling software was available for Inventor. This is how I would make a piece to allow for the shrinkage of the part, so I could do a core and cavity for my injection mold. Tedious is a good phrase for what that job used to be.

Up here choices. If you had-- and I don't have any here-- if you had a feature that was at the exact same level as this, do I want to see a line between those two faces or do I want to just let it merge? And here, I'm just keeping it solid as a solid body. This is a single solid, so it's no big deal. If there were multiple, you'd see them listed right at this level. So a fairly simple derive.

I'm going to kill this for a second. I'm going off script-- always a wonderful thing to do in front of an audience that's going to be grading your performance later-- and go back to derive. And I'll just show you the difference if you derive an entire assembly into the part file.

Would I like to update the assembly? Sure, why not? Error occurred. That's probably a reason I should've said why not, but I'll go ahead and accept it and keep moving.

So here, do I want each of these three parts? Well, maybe, I don't need the speaker. I'm only looking for the cases. So the choices are include, subtract it, include just the bounding box, intersect it. So here, I'm actually subtracting the speaker from it.

If I had pieces where this was might be the line connection across there, right now I wouldn't see a line in my final solid unless I kicked over to here, then I would see a line. And that's if they were exactly matching. Do I see that seam along the match? And this is pretty much a yes or no.

Over on this side, for any given piece, here is the same stuff that I had when I was just deriving a single part into the new part. So you have the overall assembly, and then, you have for each individual part coming in, what do you want to do? And that's really what I wanted to show here. You also have the ability to get into design representations, positional representations, level of detail representations.

And then, you're starting to talk 100 piece, 1,000 piece assembly. Maybe you want to remove any part that's smaller than a certain size. And that's a percentage of the overall bounding box of that assembly coming in. Give me everything but the little nuts, bolts and washers from that assembly that kind of idea.

So I just want to give you a quick look at what an assembly style of derive would be like. And this is what I meant by scratching the surface. So this is the level except for some of the other-- a few of the other tools that I'm looking to hit for everything. Is that going to meet everybody's expectations for today? OK, good. You heard me when-- that means a yes, OK.

All right, different from that is a multibody part workflow. And I do have a piece that I'll go and kick out into an assembly. But let me just start from a very simple beginning. I'll make a brick.

So new sketch, rectangle. It's going to be-- oh, got three by four stuck in my head for some reason. So I'll kick it out to a three by four. Not doing anything fancy with it.

And when you go to extrude, your very first extrusion automatically makes a new solid. You don't have any choice, same thing with the revolve. The very first feature of a part has to make a new solid because nothing exists. Well, OK, unless you to turn it to surfaces. There we go, pretty impressive part, eh?

I'll go make another sketch right there on this face. Project that face geometry. Finish the sketch. And now when I go back into the extrude, by default, it just wants to add to the existing solid. But here, I can go tell it it's going to be a new solid.

And I'm going to kill a couple of two birds with one stone here. I'm going to go to the More tab for extrude. I'm going to give it a negative value for the taper angle. Negative means the volume is reducing along the length of the extrusion. Apparently the mic can't pick me up and my arms are over there. And that way you can see the one piece from the other.

The green preview also indicates that it's going to be a new solid created from this. That's because of this being checked, takes these other three out of the picture. Drawing, cut, and intersect aren't valid when it's being a new solid at this point.

So OK, now in the browser, two solid bodies-- and I'm a real big fan, whether it's my extrusions, whether it's my solid bodies, that I give them some kind of name that makes sense. Because who wants to look through a list of 50 solids to try to figure out which one that you're trying to work with. So that way I can easily tell top versus bottom.

I was saying that when I do something like a-- well, yeah, I'll do that right here. If I do something like a fillet-- when I go to start picking edges for the fillet-- let's kick that up a little bit, a little more obvious. There I can pick at, and that's going to automatically apply it. Or I can explicitly say what solids are going to be affected by if I do this right now.

And I just messed it up. Of course, they both got the fillet. All right, I'll do it again on the bottom side, just a little bit slower.

OK, so right now, the only solid that's coming into play is that one. If I'd wanted to I would have to go back and edit this fillet. See how fillet two is only showing up underneath the second solid. Edit that fillet, and for fillets, I just have to pick another edge. For other tools, you might have to pick that solid button and add it to the selection group.

Continuing along the theme of why this is similar to an assembly, here I've given different parts. I can also go and turn on and off the display of individual pieces. I only have two here, so it's not real effective. But there's also a tool that is Show All or hide everything else but the one I'm on, kind of like the Isolate command, when you're working with an assembly. Great way of just focusing in on the one.

So here we go. A couple of different solids within a single part file and really the last thing I wanted to hit there on that is if I right click and go to its Properties, there's the appearance. I can say I want it to be bronze. All right, it actually looks OK on the projector too, as opposed to the top that's still back with its original color. Everything is still the same material.

Again, it's all in one part for you. You can't deviate on the materials yet. But I've got features that are affecting some solid bodies and not others. And I'm changing properties of some and not others, as well as visibility.

So to go from there and kick it out as an assembly, here's one I've already made where I-- very similar concept where I was. You can see the names are just as creative. It looks-- trying to figure out if that's a period in there. No, it's just a glitch on my screen. Yup, it look like exactly like a period right in the middle of the name, so was getting a little worried there.

This one I created, a little bit of a different technique. I made the second solid by using the Split command. I'll come back to that and-- oh no, I'll jump over that right now.

Here is a piece where I've run the Split command on. And what the Split command allows you to do is if you take this choice at the bottom, you're creating two solids from whatever single solid you're starting with. And here, I'm using a surface as my Split tool to break it out. So split is a way of separating existing pieces.

This is what I would typically do, say, I was designing that new mouse. I'd be constructing that overall shape, getting my rough shape, putting surfaces or planes where I know. I'm looking to later break into the separate parts.

I might be wrong. I might have to adjust things. Again, those aesthetics are pretty flexible early on.

But if I'm just moving that surface, that's fine. I'm still splitting the body using a surface. Life is good. Things still keep moving along smoothly. So that's why you'll see later on, I tend to keep these surfaces in there for a while.

All right, so going on and taking that solid part and kicking out to an assembly, over on the Managed tab, there are some tools in a panel called Layout. So one of them is used to make a part file from individual pieces. So I could take these solids right here and kick them out as separate parts. Excuse me.

AUDIENCE: I've got a question on that.

JIM SWAIN: Sure.

AUDIENCE: So you got a plane-- it was three planes there.

JIM SWAIN: I had a surface that was three.

AUDIENCE: Surface.

JIM SWAIN: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: So could you put a box in the middle of that, if you have a complex snap and you wanted to do a full [INAUDIBLE]?

JIM SWAIN: Yes.

AUDIENCE: It's not just there. There's a box in the middle.

JIM SWAIN: I'd have to see a sketch for what you're talking about. I think the answer is yes. What I'm using for that surface just have to be nice and flat. But I could use a ruled surface, a swept surface, a lofted surface. Loss can give you challenges other places. But I think from what you're describing, I would say yes.

Now, it might be that I do one split to make two separate pieces, then another one to get that boxed area out of there. That might be a reasonable way of going as well. If you want to come up afterwards and maybe sketch out what you're talking about, give it a try or at least look at it. How is that for a good deflection? That work? Yeah, come back to it.

So here what I'm going to do is that make component, which is going to take an individual part and take the solid bodies out of that part and create an assembly. By default, I once used the exact same name. Since I probably have done two or three of these just to get through the practice, I'm going to give it another number on the end that I know I haven't used.

I can pick a template file. I can go ahead. And if I need to go to something a little bit more in depth to find my templates, I've got the button to get me there. Where am I going to put this?

And what I found, which is fairly annoying, I couldn't just go ahead and type in the name right here. It'd give me an error message. But if I went into the browser, yeah, I'm going to make a brand new target assembly. Otherwise it's going to push it into an existing assembly.

And I could do a new folder at this stage. And let's see, today's the third. So I'll just give it today's date so I know how to delete it later. I got tired of finding files labeled junk and folders labeled junk over the years, so I started just putting dates on them. Bill of material-- what type of bill of material conditions you want from the overall assembly.

Now I need to pick the solids. So I can either pick them on the screen, pick them in the browser, what have you. Get the different solids. They're going to be kicked out as new part files.

Next tab allows me to now go and give the name. Now here you can see the name of the part files matching up with what I've renamed those solids to. So that's another reason why I like going there in the beginning.

And did anybody else attend that Top 10 Inventor Apps session yesterday? That some of those tools were going and automatically renaming things and going back and hitting the iProperties. That would be awesome. Applied to this where there were some tools that are out on the app store that will go into a folder and push iProperties down to all the parts that you select in that folder that type of thing, so that here we're starting with very little information, but I can quickly fill that in later as we go.

Again, I've got the ability to give a bill of material setting at this point. File location, I can go ahead and browse down into that folder. And it probably would have been good if I had highlighted both of those when I had gone ahead and dived down. You can multiselect there at that stage and highlight more than one.

So I've got these pieces going down there as well. And I still have the mirror part scale factor. And the color, wow, color override.

So if I had applied the different color here, that color would be assigned to the new part. It's not affecting a material. It's only assigning a color.

Those parts in the new one, they're going to have whatever my material is here, and unfortunately, it's generic. I can include parameters from this. Again, this bottom half is a lot like a derived part because it essentially is doing derived parts.

So now it went out, did its thing. Notice I'm in the assembly file. And if I go and open an individual part, generic, it's got the name Top of Case. That's what came from the other piece.

At the assembly, those are fixed-- sorry, grounded. Keep using the wrong word there. If I ungrounded, I better use some assembly constraints to hold position.

Back at the part file, I did mention that these are built in place, so they're stuck there. That wasn't quite 100% accurate. There is a command under the Modify to allow you to move bodies, so you can type in and offset distance. Question?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

JIM SWAIN: Yes.

AUDIENCE: Because currently, I'm using the Vault and is it possible to take a part from another project and put it in a new project?

JIM SWAIN: When you're using the Vault, are using one project file for everything coming out from the Vault, or you're using multiple project files that are all Vault project files?

AUDIENCE: No, I'm using multiple project files.

JIM SWAIN: All right, the answer is yes. But I believe what you would need to do is reference those other project files. I'd have to think about the right phrase.

I'm not a Vault expert at our company. We had people that are. Unfortunately, none of them are in the room, at least those from our company.

So I don't know if anybody here has more that they would like to add to the answer after we're done with the class, if you don't mind. Otherwise I'll also try and think about it. If I have an answer for you after the class, I'll let you know. OK, but the short answer is yes. The derived part workflow does work within the Vault.

All right, so back to the PowerPoint. And we're-- oh, we're doing pretty good on time. [COUGHS] Sorry, that's not going to be good on the recording. Yeah, I know.

OK so from a design point of view, things that give challenges. Sufficient Draft. If you've done plastic parts injection-- well, injection molded parts of any kind-- then, you're already familiar with this. Draft being if the mold is going to open in this direction, it's going to open, in this case, vertically as the slide is.

Right here I'm going to have trouble because I've got a vertical wall of steel, that's the blue, and a vertical wall of plastic, that's the gray. And as you try to eject that off, they're going to be rubbing. You're not going to be able to have a good surface finish. Good's in the eye of the beholder.

You can't have any texture on the inside. You're going to get texture. It's just not going to be what you want because it's going to smear as it goes along through there.

So instead, you need to put some kind of taper on there. That way, as the mold opens, you're not doing this. You're immediately getting some separation.

And there's rules that the folks that will do, like the chemical etching for the different types of look, whether it's a fake wood grain or a leather or something like that. They'll tell you what they want to have for the draft angle before you give it a resin for their particular texture. So you need to have that.

The other thing that comes in with draft is not only how much force you're going to need to take to eject it because you've got to overcome that friction in there. But also, how long do you have to let this cool before you can push it off? If you could push it off a little bit earlier, again, you're going to slightly increase your part count for a given day, a little less cost per piece.

But those walls are a little bit softer, so when you go to push on them, they have a little more give to them. So you want to balance with that where they're cool enough to push off and get that as early as you can versus wow, we just deformed it because the ejector is pushing on the bottom of that wall. So you've got that balancing game going on. And I already mentioned the surface finish.

Also the overall shape-- now by this, we had some interesting conversations trying to convince customers that you can't have a perfectly square box unless you really wanted to have an expensive mold because there was going to be some kind of taper. And we do everything we could to keep it as minimal as possible. But that straight push on push and them wanting some kind of texture, that combination was not going to work. So that was an ongoing discussion.

The other item that I'm going to hit from a plastic part design guideline, rule of thumb type of thing, is going to be trying to maintain a uniform wall thickness. So here, you can see a basic shelf for this box. And then, here's a shell where I've used a different thickness. If you expand the shell dialog box, you can change wall thicknesses for the different parts from it.