Copy Design in Autodesk Vault - Where I used it.

My hobby of not attending meetings about recycling saves more energy than your hobby of recycling.
John McCarthy

Over the course of the last few weeks of my copious spare time, I've been building up a chest of drawers in Autodesk Inventor.

As far as I've gotten so far.  The drawers are in blue.

In other words, a few minutes here, a few minutes there... 

Since I don't have a ton of time to devote to it, I have to make the best use of the time I have. 

So I use Autodesk Vault to manage the files that comprise this little side job.

It's almost like I'm working on a real project instead of just playing around with the tools! 

And, let me tell you, having those files in Vault came in handy!

The chest of drawers has three drawers that are are all very similar (the fourth opens as a desk, so it's quite different).  Only the height of the three drawers changes.  But they all have the same five basic components. 

1. A front
2. A back
3. A left side
4. A right side
5. A bottom

Each of these five components has its own piece drawing, plus an assembled view, and an exploded view.

Alright, I know some of you might be saying, "Do you really need all that."

My answer?  "No, I don't.  But this is one of those cases where I just can' resist the urge to overdo it a little!"

Okay, maybe I'm overdoing it more than a little.

But now I have these parts, assemblies, explosions, and drawings for every drawer..... So do I really want to recreate each one of those two more times?

An example of some of the documentation

The answer to that rhetorical question is, of course, a resounding NO!

So what did I do?  I created the bottom drawer, in all it's glorious detail.  The components, the assemblies, the explosions the drawings.

Then, with all that checked into Vault, I fired up my copy design, and copied the components I needed, as well as the assemblies, explosions and drawings.  I even was able to make sure that I reused the drawer bottom for the other drawers.  Since it was the same component throughout.

Choosing the drawer parts to copy

So what's the big deal?  By using copy design, everything involved in creating the drawing was already done.

Sure, I had to resize parts, adjust some dovetails, and make sure my drawings still looked clean.  But I didn't have to recreate any assemblies, explosions, drawings, then dimension and annotate that drawing all over again.

So when all was said and done, the second and third drawer were finished in a fraction of the time it took me to create the first.

It ended up being a nice little time saver!  :-D

So if you need to duplicate similar components quickly, Copy Design might just be the right tool for the job!

So here's a video for Copy Design from back in the archives !  (Click here for the full post)