Inventor iMates

If you have been working with Inventor you would probably have come across the term iMates either through a colleague, training or just seeing it on the ribbon as you go about your daily business. If you think you haven’t used iMates I can tell you categorically that you have from the first Inventor class that you attended.

Where have you already used iMates you might ask? Have you ever inserted a bolt from the content center and it inserted automatically? You have? Well then welcome to the world of iMates!

There are a couple of different iMates. There is the iMate that is placed on one component and then when inserted into the assembly you will tell it what geometry to fix itself to by holding down the ALT button on your keyboard and dragging the iMate icon onto the relevant geometry.

Then there is the iMate which you can name. How we work with this is, you name the iMate on one part and then create the corresponding named iMate on the other part. When you bring in these components into an assembly they will gravitate towards each other because of the matching names.

The third way to match iMates is if you have a multitude of iMates on various components and Inventor will allow you to cycle through the different iMates until you are happy with the constraint that is created and you can hit OK.

As you can see iMates can be very useful. it is very much like lego blocks. You just need to tell it where to go.

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