File management

[BillB]

Hello Guys & Gals

 

I am a Design Coordinator for a small machine manufacturing shop that builds specialized machines for various industries. I presently do designs in 2D Autocad ( 2002), but the BOSS came in the other day and threw an Inventor 2009 Pro box on the desk and said we were going to 3D design and I need to start implementing it, which is great. The area I want to get correct at the beginning is a good start at File Management, especially blocks/files from outside vendors (air/hyd. cylinders, springs, fasteners, etc.). Some or all of the vendor supplied blocks/dwg’s may be used in various jobs/customers designs, so where would the proper location and/or paths be located for these files, especially if our Inventor design files need to be shared with someone on the outside. Any suggestions to Links or Tutorials where I can get some good ideas to make this as painless as possible would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

BillB

[JD Mather]

Not about file management, but I would start here -

 

http://home.pct.edu/~jmather/AU2007/MA105-1L%20Mather.pdf

 

as far as file management the easiest start is to create a master folder for your Inventor work and create a Project (*.ipj) in that folder. Then create a folder for each separate project within that master folder.

 

As far as handling outside vender content that can get a bit more complicated. Dennis Jeffery (search Goolge) has some good AU documentation on that. One thing to be careful about is vendor (web download and such) content can be one step removed from pure garbage. I have written documents on how to repair 3rd party stuff but it is probably not a topic for beginners. http://www.augi.com/publications/augiworld/AUGIWorld%20091008lr.pdf You should concentrate first on making the transistion from AutoCAD to Inventor which can be frustrating at first.

[BillB]

Hey J.D.,, thank you very much for the advise, I will check out your tutorials and a few others. Just want to start the process off on the right foot and hopefully keep the frustration down to a minimum, which you know can happen. Hopefully OLD guys and dogs CAN learn new tricks.

 

Take care and thanks again

 

BillB

 

P.S. Example of our folder setup

C:/MONARCH/JOBS_2009/INVENTOR/PROJECT(.ipj)/09-XXX_XXXXX

 

MONARCH= our company

09-XXX_XXXXX= individual project number and customer name

 

Sound about right?