The Unofficial Inventor meetings...

[JD]

First, let me apologize for such short notice of our first "Unofficial Inventor Group" meeting. Fridays after work is not a time slot that encourages mass attendence especially since half of us are gone at the time due to our "split shift" approach. I've gotten a couple of responses from experienced users who would like to contribute but were not able to show up on such short notice. Anyone who wants to volunteer a certain day that is good for them, just shoot me an email (or call at x2665) and will put the word out for another fun-filled "meeting of the minds" (or "mindless", in my case).

Our first unofficial meeting had 4 participants including myself, Walter Branch, Shane Litchhult and James Thomans. These guys are really committed (or ought to be committed to a mental health institution) and I appreciate their efforts and willingness to both listen to my ramblings and speak their minds and educate us all from their own experiences and observations. A special thanks goes out to Mr. Doug Miller, for helping us to discover that only one of the 8 LAN ports in the room was operational and to Mr. David DeSutter, who stopped in to offer his encouragement and a well-appreciated "good job"!

The meeting was loosely based upon the first "tutorial" on the 2009 product, featured on the "subscription" website. This site is only available to those who have been signed-up through the company, but the question was raised if all EFCO users shouldn't be registered as such. That's a good point and I'll put that in front of the "powers that be" soon since you must be a "member" to gain access to some additional training resources and software add-ons (some of which will be very beneficial to the users... like the ability to "save back" a 2009 model for use on the 2008 product). This "save back" feature would have been useful to demonstrate a crude, little parametric 6630 fixed window that is my first creation in Inventor. Luckily, James Thomas has a 4-bar Arm model that we loaded and used to demonstrate some of the tools and settings of Inventor Suite 2008. Nice job James! We utilized the "other half" option to explore some of the constraint choices used and had the opportunity to use the "how to..." help files that are contextual and summoned by right-clicking while in the "command in question". Application and Document settings, shortcut keys and styles and standards were touched on briefly. Default Planes and their relation to the extrusion direction is a subject that may have varying importance depending to the application the user has in mind. The Inventor direction indicator made an appearance and we fiddled with the 3d orbit, common view option and look at features...

I'll close by saying that I'll try to be available for the next meeting at your convenience (feel free to meet without me, but I'd like to attend, if possible)! Let's set it up ASAP in order to give everyone as much notice as possible so they can gather their demos, questions and laptops (not required, but helpful).