Publishing a Downloaded Valve to Inventor's Content Center

“The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't reuse time”
Merrick Furst

This weekend I was put forth the challenge to "Build a valve from this website, then use it in an Inventor Design".

I went to the website to get the specifications, and found that the company had already published their content for you to download, which is becoming quite common these days.

The downloaded valve

So why rebuild it?  I'm sure you could make a case for having full control over the model, since you decide how it's built.  But then again, why spend your time, and money, building another company's part if they've already supplied it?  It might take you a couple of hours to build it, when you can download it in a few minutes.

So I decided to go ahead and download the part.  Then show how you can publish it to content center, straight from the website.  And many times, the part has all the accuracy you need for it's proper integration in the design.

So the next time you think about building a vendor part, make sure they haven't done the heavy lifting for you.

After all, isn't good engineering about not reinventing the wheel?