DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

The start point, particularly if you’re an Inventor user, is a solid body. Here you can see a basic handle built using multi bodies (for reasons that willl become apparent). I found it makes life easier to open the part on its own, rather than in-context.

Here’s your part. Notice that there are two bodies. One is the threaded shank that you don’t want to change. What you really want is to edit the overmoulded form. Find that body in the tree, right click on it and hit Edit Copy of Form. This is key. Rather than buggering about with your basic geometry, a nice workflow is the ability to automatically have the system copy it and allow you to work on that.

This kicks off a copy and transfer to Inventor Fusion. Once the system has started up, you need to consider the form you’re working on. A ultra useful tool is the Symmetry functions. This allows you to use a reference plane to define a plane of symmetry. If you’re working on a component like this, it’s ideal. It means less editing, less messing about trying to match edges and control points - and if you’re working on an injection moulded component, working like this should give you a nice clean split line if you have the plane bang in the centre.

Fusion’s Form Editing tools work on Edges, rather than UV curves on surfaces. You select the edge, add in control points (click where you want them) and manipulate those points. You can do this freely, but frankly, you can get yourself in a mess. There’re options worth exploring how those points are edited compared to related surfaces. My biggest recommendation is to use the Triad option - this gives you much more control over movement of each point, even allowing you to dial in numerical values rather than working it by eye. You can edit the form as you see fit, use multiple edge edits to achieve the form you want. The whole thing is pretty damned slick and its worth exploring the tools.

Once your edits are finished, you hit the Return to Inventor icon and it transfers back a new body that’s available for further work.

Once the basic form is back, you can then start to add additional features. In this instance, I’ve added a few fillets along the edges to round it out. It’s a pretty basic component so it does’t need too much work. That said, Inventor 2012 brings in some new variable radii G2 continuous filleting tools that could help nail this form if you’re looking for something better than “rounded off”. it might seem a little odd to do this in Inventor proper, when it’s a simple case of pushing in a fillet in Fusion. Fact is that you might want to edit the original form Edit derived shape and if you did that with Fusion, you’d struggle to edit and reapply the fillets. This way, the workflow should be much more robust when updating and effecting design change.

Final shot - component back in position. Edit time? About 3 minutes from start to finish.