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In The Machine is the official blog of the Inventor Product Management Team. It is a way for us to share Inventor news, interesting information about successful Inventor customers and partners as well as tips and tricks. From time to time we’ll also use the blog to solicit feedback from users via surveys. This blog is hosted by Garin Gardiner our Technical Marketing Manager.
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Sketch Blocks - Almost like Legos
April 8, 2009, 12:48 PM Garin Gardiner
Last week I was talking to a company that uses a lot of aluminum extrusions and often create custom extrusions for each project. They wanted a way to have all the standard pieces that make up an extrusion and insert them all together to make a custom profile. In playing around a bit with our new Sketch Blocks in Inventor 2010, it looks like this is can be easily done. To get started I created the various profiles and turned them into Sketch Blocks.
First, sketch the various profiles in a single sketch.
You then selected each of the profiles and select Create Block from the sketch tab to create separate blocks for each profile.
You will see each if these blocks in your browser as separate blocks that can be inserted with an insertion point. 
Now is where the Lego strategy comes in. Insert each of these profiles and snap them together to define a new custom extrusion - you can also use dimensions and constrains to define their exact location.
Kick off the Extrusion command and extrude any / all of the blocks to create a custom profile in the matter of minutes.
Sketch blocks were meant to be used as assembly layout although this is a great use for them for building parts with standard profiles. For those of you that have wanted to do something like this in the past - it is now easily possible with Sketch Blocks.
Enjoy!
2 Comments | Add Comment In the Machine > Tips, Inventor LT, Autodesk Inventor
Comments
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April 17, 2009 10:03 AM paul osheske
Can sketch blocks be exported into a library or shared between files?
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May 1, 2009 08:46 PM Scott Moyse
Yeah i would also like to know that, and if you change the source block in the library will it change all the ones linked to it. as in autocad. I saw that you can use autocad blocks somewhere, by importing them so that could be used in place of the library, but do they retain their links as they would in acad. I suppose the other way of doing it maybe would be do haev an ipt file containing the block and then derive to it from other parts, not sure it you would be able to pull that item through, but if you could then it would retain the link and any updates would filter through to the areas where it is used.
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