Inventor Quick Tip - Joints

by David Gate

The joint command was added to Inventor 2014 and it has been improved even further in 2015.

If you are yet to use it then I would seriously consider it. You can constrain and assemble your components with a fraction of the commands. A single joint will do the job of 3 conventional constraints.

But a little quick tip to help you select your desired joint locations. The joint command will allow you to snap to loads of different geometry, sometimes it is alittle tricky to grab the exact location you want if many options are close together as your mouse often jumps the selection around.

But if you get close to your desired location (ie the same feature/face) then you can hold down the control (Ctrl) key and it will lock the selection to only the joint locations on that face.

A picture/animation paints a thousand words so see below.