Curtis Waguespack has a great article over on his website that details the procedure for moving a part to the origin of your drawing.
While he places emphasis on the use of this for imported parts, it's also extremely useful if you have created a part in an assembly with respect to other parts and then want to re-use it in other assemblies (parts created with reference to other parts assume the origin of the parent part/sub-assembly). It doesn't make a huge difference to the assembly process - you can constrain parts easily enough regardless of where they are with respect to the origin - but being able to use the origin planes as constraints without having to create more workplanes has its benefits.
In short, either make a copy or derive the original part and then take note of the location of its centre of gravity from iProperties. Then use the Move Bodies command and enter those values as negatives in the offset dialogue.
A similar result can be achieved with the moment rotation, except you don't invert the values. There is only one prompt here for the angle, leaving you manually pick the axis around which to rotate.
- Doing this with the original part (as opposed to a copy or a derived part) will affect its position in the main assembly.
- If you intend to do both a rotation and a move, do the rotation first as it affects the positional CoG.
Of course those of you who attended this year's Micro Concepts Technical Learning Academy, will have seen this demonstrated by Peter Barker in his popular Inventor Tips and Techniques session.
If this is the kind of process you would like to see automated in our MC Tools package, please let us know.
