Autodesk Inventor 2011 derived components and multi-body part design are quite a great combination, but some information is lost in the mix.
It’s not really lost, but temporarily unavailable in the derived component. When deriving components from multi-body parts, the solid comes in without feature identification, because we are only importing the solid body. The history is still intact and easily editable in the original multi-body file, but in the individual part, the browser history is an empty slate.
I’ll discuss some aspects of Top Down strategy planning in an upcoming article, but today I wanted to point out the fact that even though the features are not in the model browser (which can be a blessing) embedded data information such as thread specifications are not lost. Look at this hole for example.
I needed a threaded hole for this shoulder bolt. I decided to go back to the multi-body base part, and apply it there. After a quick save and update, you can see in the image below that the hole feature header did not populate the derived component’s model browser. No surprise there.
What is interesting is that the hole data is passed through to the *.idw drawing annotation.
So you can see that even though the features do not populate the model browser, thread data passes through the derived component.
