In conclusion, I have to say I wish I had tried this app out sooner, but now that I have, I'm glad I did.
It's like creating a napkin sketch, but with the added benefits of being able to modify the diagram, and avoid getting food on your engineering designs! I can see how using this application can help get a mechanism conceptualized before firing up a CAD application and creating models that may have to be thrown away because part way through the process, it's realized that I've gone down the wrong design road. It allowed me to sit on my couch, and analyze the landing gear mechanisms and better understand how they worked!
I had a lot of fun playing with these two mechanisms. The first was a picture of the landing gear for a Douglas DC-3, the second, the extended and retracted positions for a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. So to satisfy my geeky curiosity, I imported two images to try out as backgrounds.
If you're not familiar with Force Effect Motion, it's a mobile app that works on Apple and Android devices, and allows for the laying out of mechanical mechanisms on a mobile device, instead of using paper and pencil, or even firing up a CAD package like Autodesk Inventor or AutoCAD.Ī Force Effect Motion diagram - Courtesy of the Autodesk Force Effect Facebook Page.
Have a few thoughts you want to share? Feel free to drop a comment or two!Īs the holidays approached, I found myself finally taking a look at something I had told myself to look at, and "never got around to it". This is what happens when clicking on the border of a cell! That's all there is to it! But there's a couple of other tips worth knowing.ġ) If the table needs to be "recombined", right click on the table, and choose Table>Un-Split TableĬombining a "un-splitting" a split table.Ģ) This is very important! Don't click on the border of the cell! The "Split Table" option will gray out if the border of the cell is clicked on! The hole table can then be split again, and again, as needed! Click and drag on the tables to reposition them. Make sure to click inside one of the fieldsĪfter choosing the "Split Table" option, the table will split at that cell. All I have to do is right click inside one of the fields, and choose "Table>Split Table". Let's say I want to split the table at the row 'C1'.
I know the table isn't that long, and probably doesn't need to be split in this case, but bear with me, it's just an example! Besides, I didn't feel like modeling a part that did run off the page! Once upon a time, when I was designing stamping dies, there were many a time that the hole table describing all the holes in a die plate would run off the page.īack at that time, I was using AutoCAD, so breaking was a matter of inserting and manually populating blocks.īut what happens if the same thing needs to be done with Inventor? Below is an example of a hole table I want to split. “Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split the boulder.”Īs I'm waiting for 2013 to arrive, I came across a little tip in Autodesk Inventor that it could be said falls into the "I never noticed that" section.