Moving a part to the origin

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.

A couple of things to note:
- 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.

Derive and Move Bodies Within a Part

Most people will be aware that Inventor has a Derive tool, allowing you to Derive a Part or Assembly into another Part file.

This can be a useful tool for many different reasons, including creating Mirrored components, Scaled components or a Multibody Solid of different parts.

If you Derive parts into a file it is likely that they will not arrive in the right place, so the steps below will highlight a method for adjusting the geometry to suit your needs.

• Firstly open a Part file into which you want to derive another Part into, or start a new Part file to Derive various Parts into.
• Now click Derive on the Model TAB. You will be presented with the Derived Part dialogue, where you can change various settings, including Derive style, Status, Scale factor, Mirror part etc. The important elements in this exercise are to set Derive style to Solid Bodies and select Solid Bodies as the information we want to bring in. Then click OK to Derive the part into the open file.

Assign Items to Multiple Files With The Same Part Number

If you are trying to Assign Items to files that share the same Part Number you may have noticed a peculiar behaviour. Consider the following Assembly...