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Manufacturing

Bolted Connection Generator Tool (Avatech Tricks Tutorial)

30 Apr, 2007 By: Noah Whitehead

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Create bolted connections that are fully constrained and easy to edit in Inventor.

The BCG (Bolted Connection Generator) tool in Inventor is very useful and powerful. It lets you select and position bolts and fasteners from the Content Center and constrain them into your assemblies making you more efficient. The BCG is located on the Assembly Panel and is accessible during the assembly phase of your design.

Create a Bolted Connection
Inside the BCG, there are four ways to select how you want to position your fasteners: linear, concentric, on point and by hole.

After selecting one of the four options, select the position of the fastener by going through the placement steps to pick points, edges and planes on your assembly.

After you select the position, you can choose the type of fastener from the Content Center Library, a library of standard parts representative of all industry standards such as ANSI, ISO, DIN and the like.

How to Recognize a Bolted Connection
After you've created the bolted connection, the parts show up in the assembly fully constrained and listed in the parts tree.

What Does a Bolted Connection Tool Do?
The bolted connection has several key benefits. Having the luxury of placing and constraining multiple parts at one time is critical for saving time. You can edit the connection by using the Design Accelerator. You can access this function by highlighting the Bolted Connection in the parts tree and right-clicking the mouse. When you choose Edit using the Design Accelerator, the Bolted Connection Component Generator dialog box appears, and you can change the parts.

If you use the Bolted Connection in more than one place, you can add it to a templates library located in the Bolted Connection Component Generator dialog box. If you need to place the same bolted connection multiple times in an assembly, you should place it once using the generator, make copies of the connection and constrain the copies separately. By doing this, you can edit the connection once and they all update. If you must change the connection and you use generator to place each of them in your assembly, you must edit each connection to make the change.