Being Inventive

Tooth shape accuracy from Gear Generator

You have created your gears with the Gear Generator module from the menu Design, Power Transmission, without problems or errors.

By the way, in the model you notice some small interference.

And also, creating a drawing with the view of the Gear teeth, you notice that this is a simplified representation.

This behavior is as designed.

To get accurate model, you need to do the following.

• Right-click the gear subassembly in the browser and select to Export tooth shape.

• In the following dialog select if you want to export the Gear or Pinion tooth shape.

You can find more details for the other settings and in general for this command in the help, under “Export tooth shape”.

• Then, in the resulting model, extrude the profile.

• Finally, use circular pattern to get amount of teeth you need.

Creating the view of the teeth of this model you can notice the better accuracy.

This process is shown in the first 2-3 minutes of this video, created by my friend Anton Fedoseyev.

Audio is in Russian, but you can watch the steps anyway.

Ale

Content Center elements not available when using Bolted Connection

You are using Inventor 2012 and you retrieve the Content Center Library from the Vault Server 2012 installed on a localized (non-English) Operating System.

When you try to add a fastener in Bolted Connection you get the following error message:

“Content Center server query failed. Please check your Content Center configuration to make sure all required libraries are present or check Content Center connectivity to server.”

After that, the fasteners dialog is empty.

 

If you try to insert the same fastener in the assembly using the command “Place from Content Center”, there is no problem.

 

In order to solve this issue, install the hot fix for the Vault Server you can download from the link below:

http://usa.autodesk.com/getdoc/id=DL17547816

Please, read the Readme file before installing the hot fix.

Ale

Shaft calculation after adding grooves, keyways or chamfers

Shaft generator calculations are based on the shaft section as shown in the 2D preview window.
This might not always be obvious especially when you start adding certain extra features to the shaft.

In Figure 1 you can see that some features present on the left side of the 3D model are not represented in the 2D calculation preview in Figure 2.

 

Figure 1: 3D model of shaft

 

Figure 2: 2D model of shaft (used for calculation)

The explanation is that any feature that adds material to or removes material from the shaft like a chamfer, a fillet, a groove or a keyway, will not be used in the 2D shaft calculation.

To obtain more advanced calculation results, use the Stress Analysis module rather than the Shaft generator module.