What's Old is New Again. Sketch Blocks in Inventor.

“The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.”

Albert Einstein

I too am sometimes guilty of not trying something new because the old way works 'just well enough to not change'.

A tool that fell into this category is sketch blocks in Inventor's sketching environments.

An example of sketch blocks in Inventor laying out the suspension
(click to enlarge)

I saw it once in a demo, and thought "Hey, that's cool! I should remember to take a closer look at.... LOOK A SHINY THING!"

Needless to say, it wasn't until just this week I had, what in marketing speak is referred to as a "Compelling Event' to revisit this.

Now that I have that compelling event, I can look back and think of my college senior project, the SAE Mini-Baja. We build a small off-road car for a competition way back when, in 1996.

Rolling something out of the 'if I knew then what I knew now' category, here's a video on how we might have done things differently, had we had Inventor then.



If only we'd had it then. I think we would have been done a lot quicker. But sometimes all we can do is wish.

Happy Inventing!