Demonstrate the ability to create weldment assemblies

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Demonstrate the ability to create weldment assemblies.

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After completing this video, you'll be able to utilize a weld in the weldment environment, perform Weld prep,

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and perform machining operations within a weldment.

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To get started in Inventor, we want to open up the supplied dataset Weldment Assembly.IAM,

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which can be found in the Assembly subfolder under the Weldment folder.

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When we're talking about weldments, it's important to note that weldments are assemblies,

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but in the context of a bill of materials, they're treated as single line items.

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For our purposes in this video, we're going to focus on preparation, welds, and machining.

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When working with weldments, there are three stages to the process.

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First, we need to prepare our models for welding,

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then we need to add our weld beads, and finally we add any machining features required.

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The preparation stage applies modeling edits, but it doesn't affect the original designs.

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No changes to the link base, PIVOT one, or PIVOT 2 will be seen in their individual IPT files,

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and they'll only be contained within the weldment assembly.

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We're going to get started with preparation, and we're going to focus our attention on the chamfer.

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When creating welded assemblies, often times you add a chamfer to allow for deeper weld penetration.

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We're going to add a .05 chamfer to this upper edge where we've got a boss going through and select OK.

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Once we're done with our preparation features, we can select return.

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The next stage in the process is to add any weld data.

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By selecting welds, we open up the option to add fillet welds, groove welds, and cosmetic welds.

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There are some additional options, for example, bead reports, end fills, and adding symbols.

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And for the purposes of our video, we're going to focus specifically on fillet and groove welds.

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First, let's take a look at the groove weld.

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The groove weld is used when we're talking about applying a weld between two faces.

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First, we can select an individual face, in this case, the chamfer that we added,

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we're going to select full face weld because we want to completely use that entire face.

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Next, we're going to select the outside of this cylinder.

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In this case, we don't want to use full face weld because we don't need the weld to go all the way to the top

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and all the way to the bottom of that cylinder.

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And last, we have a fill direction.

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We're going to use the radial fill option and select OK.

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This is going to apply a weld bead inside of the groove based on the entire face of the chamfer

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and going up to that same position based on the size of that bead.

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Next, let's take a look at adding a fillet weld bead.

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When we add a fillet weld bead, we have a different selection process.

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In this case, we're going to begin by selecting the top face of our design,

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moving over to our second selection, and select the face of our cylinder.

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Note that the preview is showing it's stopping here, and this is because the size of the weld bead is too large to go around this face.

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We can reduce the size to something like .08 to get a full weld.

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When we're using weld beads inside of the weldment environment,

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we also have the option to create a welding symbol.

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When we add welding symbols, there are several areas that we need to consider when filling them out.

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We need to consider things like the size of the fillet as well as information about the weld symbol.

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In this case, we're going to leave this as a fillet weld and we're going to say OK to apply the weld symbol,

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but note that nothing has been added to the text.

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If we double click on the weld symbol, it allows us to go back and make modifications.

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The weld symbol itself needs to include information about at least the size of the fillet and the profile of the weld itself.

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We also have options for things like the way that the weld is going to be treated afterwards

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and additional information that can populate our weld symbol.

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If we go back to our Welds folder, expand, and we go back to our original groove weld bead,

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we can right click and edit the feature, and note that we don't have an option to add a welding symbol here.

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There are two different types of welds.

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We've got our groove weld and our fillet weld.

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The fillet weld allows us to add that symbol while the groove weld does not.

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And that's OK because welding symbols can be added manually here,

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or they can be added on detailed drawings and pull in metadata from some of the welds.

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Next, let's select return and go to our machining operation.

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Machining operations are often completed after welding to create precision features in a design.

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For example, we want to add a 2D sketch to the top of this face,

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and we're going to use the project geometry to select this edge as well as this edge.

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Right click to OK, and then we're going to add a center diameter circle at the center of both of these edges.

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We'll then use our dimension tool to create a precise hole, this case .325 on the smaller side and .5 on the larger side.

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When we finish our sketch, we can then use our extrude tool to take both of these sketches through the entire part.

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Now that we've added our machining feature,

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we can return back to the weldment environment.

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So at this point, we've added a couple of welds using the fillet bead and the groove bead.

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We've also talked about weld preparation by adding a chamfer to an edge before adding our Weld beads,

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and we've used the machining operations to make sure that we've got tolerance controlled holes at the end of the welding process.

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One last note about weld beads and the specifically weld symbols:

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weld symbols that are added to the weldment environment will be displayed automatically in a detailed drawing

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when we're adding these weldment symbols.

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However, you will not be able to edit the Weld symbol inside of the detailed drawing.

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You'll have to come back to the weldment assembly to make modifications to the symbol.

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In most cases, you want to make sure that you have the data captured

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either at the weldment assembly level or at the detailed drawing level

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to make sure that the welds are accurately called out on the detailed drawing before manufacture.