Coil Tool and Options - Autodesk Inventor Part Tutorial | Autodesk Inventor 2021 IN DEPTH

[♪ Music Playing ♪] Hey everybody it's Alex with Engineering Applied we're going to be accelerating your career hobby or business with this overview of the available coil tool found within autodesk inventor if you want more easy to understand and practical content made by an experienced engineer like myself make sure you like this video subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications so you don't miss out on any helpful content like this in the future if you're looking for specific functions check the description for time stamps and if you don't find what you're looking for in this video make sure you check out my other videos in the autodesk inventor tutorial series because i'm confident you'll find exactly what you're looking for let's get started okay to demonstrate the coil tool and its options we'll be creating a spring found at the end of a retractable ballpoint pen so i know you all are all familiar with this type of pen at the end of this pen there's a little spring that allows for that action to work and i want to connect this lesson with a real life example i firmly believe this helps with the retention of the information and it helps you make that transition and applying this information to your job or your projects that you're doing or you know something new that you're making for your business so to get started what we're going to do is we're going to jump into a blank part file and we'll go through all of the options found for the coil tool and we'll create this spring and its variable pitch characteristics okay here we are in our blank part file and the first thing that we need to do is we need to create some sketch geometry in which to reference the coil function off of so the coil function needs two things it needs a cross-section shape and then it needs an axis in which to rotate that coil feature around so we're going to create a 2d sketch in this case i'm just going to use the xy plane this is completely arbitrary it just depends on where you want to take the design and what you want to do with it so what i'll do here is i'll create a circle at the origin and the circle is going to be .016 inches it's a it's a small diameter it's a small gauge wire okay so we're going to hit ok and we are going to finish the sketch and then now we need to create a second sketch with a vertical axis in which we dimension the diameter of this coil off of so we'll create a second sketch we're going to use the x y plane once more and i'm just going to drop a line somewhere out here making sure that it's vertically positioned and we're going to set that as construction okay now let's dimension this so we have the radius or the diameter of our spring in this case i want it to be .073 for the radius off of the center point of the coil cross section so we'll set that and then we'll go ahead and click ok and finish that sketch okay you notice that i have everything fully defined like we typically like to do in our sketches and we go up to the coil tool okay now we're in our coil tool and before we jump into the actual execution of this command i want to talk about some of the menu options along the top here so the first tab you see up here is the properties tab and if i were to click this x it would actually close out of the coil command so if i click that x we jump out of the coil command we'll jump back into the coil command you have a little plus sign here so you can add your ilogic panes or your favorites panes where you can access your content center library in this case we don't need that we're moving along the top here to the advanced settings menu now there's some options found in this advanced settings menu that's common with the extrude function the revolve function and some of the others that create 3d geometry so if you're familiar with those you can go ahead and skip this part if not this applies to those other options as well so the first option is the keep sketch visible on and for this option what this essentially says is when this is checked off and we have our features selected and i use this plus sign to execute the feature it will keep the coil command open and it will keep the original sketch geometry that's referenced for this feature active so i'll just demonstrate that now i hit the plus sign and you'll notice it keeps that original profile at the end there active and then it keeps the window open for me to continue using this feature over and over again so just depending on what you're trying to do here if this helps improve the speed of your workflow by all means use this so that is available to you there we're gonna hit cancel we're going to jump back into coil okay so we are in our coil command and uh let's jump back up to this advanced settings menu the next option is the hide presets option so essentially all this does is it hides this little presets menu up here so if i click that it goes away let's show that again and let's move down to the single enter to finish command we'll get back to the presets here in just a moment so essentially when this is active all this says is all i have to do is hit the enter key once after entering a value to finish this command so give you an example of that so let's go ahead and make sure our axis is selected so it populates that and let's say i want something with five revolutions well i type in a five and when i hit enter once it finishes the command if i uncheck that i have to hit command twice to actually you know finish and exit out of the coil function so just depending on what setting configurations you like and how you like to work you know you can play around with that as needed so we'll go back to coil once more now let's talk about presets for a minute so presets allow us to create a custom option that if we commonly use this option it allows us to quickly access it so let me give you an example of this so say for example it's common for us to create this particular spring profile so it has a pitch of .087 inches and it has five revolutions so maybe this is a standard piece of hardware or standard feature that we commonly create so what we can do is we can go along the top and let's just call this uh default coil okay we hit the little check mark and so we've created our new preset with these parameters and if we pull this drop down open you'll notice that we have our no preset option so we could select that we could go to our last used so that will default to the last used preset or we could go to whatever custom profiles that we created here so now let's say for example you want to edit this as in you want to save it you want to rename it you want to delete it whatever you can go over to this preset settings option and you have options to again save rename or delete you can change the sort order in that little drop down menu and so on and so forth so in this particular case we don't really want to create a default of this profile so what we can do is we can go ahead and delete that make sure the preset of interest is already selected before you click the delete option so we go to delete current and now if we go back to our menu it's no longer there now you'll notice there's a little blue cube up in the top right corner this is to signify that we are in our solid mode and essentially what this says is when we execute this command it creates a solid body now if we go back and change that it switches to surface mode so again if we execute this it creates surface geometry instead of a solid body okay moving right along here our next section is the input geometry section so this is where we select the geometrical elements and our axis geometry that we begin to create this coil off of so this first option up here is the profiles option so what this does is we want to select our cross section that we want to create the coil out of so in this case our cross section shape is that circle that i began to draw in that first sketch the second option is the axis option and to make sure this is selected you'll see a little thin blue line so if i click in here you'll see that blue line up here that means it's ready to select a profile down here it's ready to select an axis so we'll go ahead and select this center axis that we created to revolve around so now you can see why i was referring to that construction line as our radius for the coil option because in this case it is centered to that coil feature okay now you'll see these two little arrows here these two arrows is to allow us to reverse the pitch direction so if i click that it's going to invert the direction that the coil function executes in so in this case i actually want it in the original orientation because we want to go in the positive y direction okay so the next section is behavior section and the first option within the behavior section allows us to control exactly how we are creating the coil feature so we have these four options here the first one is pitch and revolution so this allows us to control the coil based off of the pitch or the distance between the turns in the coil and how many revolutions or how many turns we have in the coil itself the next option is revolution and height so that allows us to control the coil based off of how many turns or revolutions we have in the coil and how high that coil segment goes the next one is pitch and height so we control it based off the distance between the turns and how high the overall coil goes and then spiral spiral just flattens out the profile onto a plane and just creates a flat coil there okay so let's go back to revolution and height because that's how we're going to start off our pin spring design so the next option that we're going to take a look here for our design is the revolution count again this controls how many turns you have in your coil feature and in this case we want to have two turns in the coil and we want it to occupy a height of 0.055 inches okay one thing i want to point out is at the end of these fields we have these little arrows that we can click to pick up various feature dimensions to use as a value in this space so i can measure something maybe it's a um a height of an edge in the part somewhere that i want to model so maybe i have a flat edge somewhere in the part that's .055 inches and i want this to be identical to that i can click measure pick up that part and it'll mirror that onto this height section we can also select a feature dimension as well and then some previously used values that we may have used in the past for quick selection if we don't quite remember what it was off the top of our heads now moving down we have our taper section so now we have a zero degree taper but let's put a 45 degree taper in there just to see what happens so if we put a positive value it's going to expand the end of the coil outwards and if i put a negative value so let's say negative 15 degrees for example and you'll see the end of that coil sort of tapers inwards at 15 degrees if you've ever seen the soldering pen holders where it's like a coiled wire where it starts larger on the the front end and tapers down to a smaller end this would be a practical use for this particular option and there's tons of other stuff out there that you might use the taper option for but that's the taper itself so we're going to set that back to zero next we have our rotation option so we can have a left hand rotation or a right hand rotation so in this case we want to leave it as a right hand rotation but if i were to click left hand it would just reverse that for us we have our selector style drop down box so we can either get icons as our selector style or a drop down menu so if i change that to drop down it changes this to a little drop down menu okay so i'm going to actually change this back to icons because that's what i personally prefer the next two options which are currently checked typically start out unchecked so you have closed start and closed end so let's say for example on our coil we want the start or the end to be flattened out or tapered to some angle in our case we actually want to do that because we want flat ends on our coils so that it sets on the ledges in our pin as designed so in this case we actually want to close the start of the spring so we're just going to click close start and you notice that it sort of flattened out the start of this coil so let me just go back and redo that for you real quick so we uncheck it it opens up the end of the spring we close it it flattens that out so it can sit nicely on whatever ledge or step that we have in our part and then you could change the flat angle so we could change that to something a little bit more shallow so maybe 25 degrees or maybe we want to keep it at 90 in this case we want to keep it at 90 and then we can also change our transition so again we can go to a shallower angle and it just um allow opens up that transition angle a little bit and so on and so forth so we'll just close that back down again okay so we're at our parameters we need for the start of the spring so we're going to hit ok now the next segment is we want to use a different method or behavior option to create the middle section of the spring so what i'm going to do to create a smooth transition between the starting segment and the middle section is i'm going to actually create a sketch right on the face where the spring ends and this is a trick you can use with a lot of different features um so we'll go ahead and just create a 2d sketch on this face okay and i'm just going to project the geometry of that cross section so i just clicked project geometry click the edge and hit ok ok so now we're going to just click finish sketch and we're going to move back up to coil now it wants us to select an axis but we no longer have an axis there you don't have to redraw this what you can do is you can open up the drop down for the original coil and we're going to go back and select the sketch 2 for our axis and we're going to right click and go to visibility so now it's visible we can go back into coil again select that original axis and recycle it and now we're going to set our parameters for this so we're going to use pitch and revolution for this one because we want to control it based on the pitch of the spring and then how many turns in the spring we have so for our pitch we're going to select .087 inches and we want to have 10 revolutions or turns in the spring so we're gonna just verify that looks okay to us and um for this segment we're going to actually close the start and the end and i'll explain more why as we move along but just to give you a brief snapshot of that if we leave this unchecked and hit ok and then we look at this transition here between the initial section it's not quite a fluid transition between the close section here in the start and this open section at the end here and at the beginning of the separate segment so what we want to do is we actually want to go back into this as an option and we want to close the start and since the other side of the spring is essentially what we started on this side we want to go ahead and hit closed end and make sure everything's at 90 degrees because i want a smooth transition there and one thing i want to talk about here now that we're back in the menu is the output section so you see our boolean operations this works exactly the same as it does in the extrude and revolve functions that you may have seen before and um the first option that we're typically going to use is join so when join is selected and we hit ok and just notice briefly that that angle is more flattened out and it's more of a smooth transition as it goes up but anyways so join essentially combines all of these features into the single solid body so if we select that solid body in our model tree everything gets selected simultaneously so that shows that it's a single solid body well what if we want it as separate solid bodies or what if we want to do something different so let's go back and let's actually update this again okay so if we go to cut let's say for example i have some sort of shape maybe a block or something i can actually cut this profile that's coiled out of that solid block if i want to do that to demonstrate the cut command i went ahead and just modeled up a solid block here and we're going to keep this coil going up through the solid block so we'll just go back to our 3d model area click coil select our original axis and we're going to just change this boolean operation to cut and we'll just click ok so you can see what happens so now you'll see that i cut that coil into this shape so if i go to view and then just take the section of this just draw it in here oops went a little too far there you'll see that the coil cut through that middle section of the block um so we'll go ahead and jump back a couple steps so now let's look at the other command which is intersect so we'll go to coil select the axis change it to intersect and click ok that only keeps the intersection point between the coil and that block profile let's jump back once more and we'll go back into coil the next option is new solid so if i select that what's going to happen is when i create this new segment it's going to be a separate solid body from the original coil piece and from the solid block up here so if i hit okay and i hover over it it's a separate solid body and now if i go to solid 1 it includes the original beginning of the coil and the solid block because i didn't designate it as a separate solid body at that step but if i go to solid two it highlights this uh segment of the coil as its own separate entity so this is a really neat way to control how many solid bodies you have in your part and sort of how you want that laid out resuming our original operation for this middle section of the spring i went ahead and deleted that extruded block we don't need that anymore and we're just going to click this axis make sure this is set to join because i want each segment of the spring to all be one solid body and i'm going to make sure the closed start and close end is activated so that we have a smooth transition between the uh each segment of the spring from the open parts with the larger pitch to the smaller uh pitch sections so we're gonna click ok now let's jump to the last section here that we have to create so we're gonna create another closed end like we do have on this side let's create our final sketch so we're going to go to start 2d sketch click on this exposed face of the middle coil section and we're just going to project the geometry of this face here click ok and finish 2d sketch go to coil select the axis we want to rotate around and we just want to make sure our method is set to revolution and height so we want to control this as two revolutions or two turns in this coil segment with a height of .055 inches with a zero degree taper this all looks good and then for our options down here we actually want to leave it as a closed end because we want the end of this coil so the top end of this coil to be flat so it sets on the step in our pen casing properly but we're going to leave closed start unchecked because we want it to be a smooth transition between the end section and the middle section so this all looks good to me just make sure your boolean operation is set to join so it's a single solid body click ok and there we go now we have our completed spring for our retractable ballpoint pen so again you see our smaller pitch section on the ends so that it sets on our step properly and then we have our middle section that concludes this segment of the autodesk inventor part creation module where we took a look at the available coil tool don't forget to like this video subscribe to my channel and turn on notifications to stay up to date on future content that will help you reach your goals along your journey and of course don't hesitate to leave a comment or reach out via my website contact page and let me know if there's anything else you'd like to learn about or see on this channel i love sharing my knowledge and experience with the community and i cannot wait to see all of the amazing things you'll be doing out in the world with this information thanks for watching and i'll see you again soon [♪ Music Playing ♪]

Channel: Engineering Applied

Views: 562

Keywords: autodesk inventor tutorial, autodesk inventor tutorial for beginners, autodesk inventor 2021 tutorial, how to use autodesk inventor 2021, inventor tutorial 2021, autodesk inventor professional 2021 tutorial, autodesk inventor coil command, inventor coil feature, coil inventor, inventor coil spring

Id: PBCWiRRjaNs

Length: 21min 1sec (1261 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2020