Mastering Autodesk® Inventor® 2012 and Autodesk® Inventor LT™ 2012

Understanding Subassemblies

You create assemblies by placing constraints between parts to position and hold those parts together. When working with small assemblies, you can often assemble all the parts together at one level. Working with larger assemblies, however, often requires the use of multiple levels of assemblies for the sake of organization and performance. Lower-level assemblies are referred to as subassemblies.

Imagine a common caster-wheel assembly. Although it may seem like a simple component, it is, of course, made up of many small parts. If you needed to use this caster in an assembly multiple times, you wouldn't place all the small parts into an assembly individually over and over. Instead, you would package them as a subassembly ...