Inventor 2015 – Reorient Sketch

By Luke Davenport 

Issue:

You draw the best Inventor sketch of your life, constrain the life out of it - and then you realise you’ve drawn it on the wrong face. Take your sanity in your hands and try to reposition the sketch? Or accept your fate and start again? 

Solution:

Well fear not – it may be much easier than you think to get the result you want….

Check out the video below. If the Sketch -> redefine tool leaves your sketch in the wrong orientation, you need to use the ‘Edit Co-ordinate System’ tool. 

Also, a quick final tip – if your sketch actually flips or inverts itself on the new face, then simply re-orienting it won’t do the job. In a case like this your best option will probably be to create a zero-offset workplane on the target face for your sketch, then right click on the plane and hit ‘Flip Normal’. This will then flip any sketches that you paste onto the plane, which should allow you to rotate the sketch correctly.

……. And if you can’t get that to work either, there’s always the option of making a quick temporary sketch block out of the geometry in your rogue sketch, and then pasting this into a new sketch, and simply rotating and constraining the block to suit. See this article here on sketch blocks if this piques your curiosity.

https://www.cadlinecommunity.co.uk/hc/en-us/articles/201694032-Autodesk-Inventor-2013-Library-of-Sketches-and-images

Onwards!