Inventor 2010: Tooling and Mold Design

Inventor 2010 tooling is a new package that automates the tooling design process. Not only does it automate designing the core and cavity portion of the mold, but it automates adding the mold body and all the components from a standard database of manufacturer parts.

The nice part about this process is that this design in just like an Inventor assembly.  All the parts are fully associated with the original part file. This equates to getting your product to market faster with fewer or no physical prototypes.

The workflow for creating tooling and molds is very intuitive, even if you are not familiar with tooling and mold creation.  Inventors wizard based interface and database of standard parts help you to make decisions along the way to streamline your design process.  These databases and wizards include:

         Part pull direction wizard

         Material database of over 7,500 materials

         Automated Patch and Parting surface wizard

         Automated Mold Size

         Automated Core and Cavity design

         Automated Runner and Gate design

         Inventor Mold design tool Standard database of components from many manufacturers

         Automated mold analysis tool

With the use of the standard component database, your designs will be more consistent.  These databases include parts from some of the most widely used manufacturers:

DME, Futaba, HASCO, LKM, Pedrotti, Polimold, Ravourdin, Strack, Meusburger, Misumi, National, Progressive, Punch, and Sideco

These catalogs include sliders, lifters, ejectors, sprue bushings, locating rings, cooling parts and mold bases.

The tooling suite also uses the ribbon interface to help you through the design.  The steps to complete a mold are in order across the top of the screen.  This makes learning the process very simple. 

Sample workflow:

Place your part, select the material, and the orientation.

Automatically have the program define the mold size, generate the parting surface and generate the core and cavity.

Automatically position the gates and runner system and run the fill analysis.

Select the mold base, ejector pins, sprue bushings, locator ring and cooling channels.

And lastly, have the drawing wizard automatically generate the documentation.

As you can see there are many benefits to using Inventor tooling suite. It turns a lengthy, labor-intensive process into a quick, easy process.  This is a very exciting new tool, make sure you give it a try.  Below is a summary of the advantages this tool can provide:

          Easy to learn and use: Mold Design guides the user step-by-step through the mold design process. Less experienced users can take advantage of the guided and intuitive process steps. Experienced mold designers quickly achieve the highest levels of proficiency for high productivity gains.

          Automation and intelligence: Mold Design enables you to perform complex procedures with minimum input by replacing labor-intensive steps with process-specific functions. The result is much faster turnaround compared to traditional software systems.

          Complete associativity: Mold Design provides complete associativity in the entire mold design process, enabling the user to change mold designs at will. Changes made to the moldable part are automatically propagated to the core and cavity, and any changes to cooling channels, plates, or standard components are automatically reflected in the mold base.