Using an iFeature in Autodesk Inventor - Part 1

“Ideas are the building blocks of ideas.”
Jason Zebehazy

The Autodesk Inventor iFeature.  I've described it as Inventor's version of an AutoCAD Block.  When there's a repetitive feature that needs to be placed multiple times with repeatability, this is a place to look.

First, Autodesk Inventor has several iFeatures that ship with it.

Inventor ships with several iFeatures built in

You can find them by clicking on the "Insert iFeature" icon.  It's found on the Manage Tab.

Placing iFeatures

But the iFeatures Inventor has may not cover all the iFeatures that might be needed.  In that case, new iFeatures can be created and added to the library.

In my humble opinion, I think this is one of Inventor's tools that gets overlooked.  While it may be an answer for every solution, there are definitely some places it can make a job go by a lot more easily. 

 The iFeature has a lot of flexibility, among these are:

• The ability to add variable dimensions that can be changed by the user
• The ability to limit these dimensions to a list of numbers, or a range of numbers
• The ability to create table of variants for different types of placed features

So there is a quite a bit to go over.  So I'm going to break this particular blog into parts.  So in the first part, I'll just show how we can create an iFeature, and place it onto a part.

A couple of suggestions before the video, I like to create an "iFeature generator".  That is, I create a component to build the iFeature.

I do this because if I need to adjust the iFeature, I can return to the generator and make the adjustments I need. 

My iFeature Generator for this post

Trust me, I learned this one the hard way.  In this case the hard way wanted to make an adjustment to my iFeature, but having to rebuild it because I didn't save it the first time!

So to see how this iFeature was used, take a look at the video!

And if you're looking for some additional iFeatures to use, try Charlie Bliss's site here!