Otto the Bin.

This is a beauty.  This 240 litre Otto bin was modelled in response to a conversation one of my customers had with me on a visit to the office.  He said he and a friend were thinking of making a trailer to carry Otto bins behind their small yard tractors, cars or utes to their front gates.  These guys live a long way from their front gates and it’s difficult wheeling their bins to the gate as we city slickers do.

The next day I had the misfortune to have one of my disagreements with Autodesk and in a temper turned my attention away from that problem to my customers.  A great way to relax, solve a problem. Step one drag Otto the Bin into the office measure and model it in MDT. Then apply yourself to the trailer. Cannot show you the trailer for obvious reasons, suffice to say a great afternoons work in that we not only solved the problem of being able to readily load and carry, upright, two differing size bins a once, but the trailer converts very quickly to a flat top with a back board for other uses, hay bales etc, and for this we used AutoCAD to loft the idea and model the trailer.

Want the design? Let me know and a deal may be struck with the customer.

Back to the business at hand briefly, Otto is a SIMPLE shape created in MDT and 'the great translations utility' in Inventor should do the trick. Wrong, Wrong and Wrong again!  Guess what it wouldn’t translate to Inventor 5, nor Inventor 5.3 and still not into Inventor 6.  It simply does not translate usefully? (this area of Autodesk's consistency needs to be improved greatly) I don’t think I’ll try anymore, three strikes and Inventor is out for this job.

If the trailer goes into production the AutoCAD-MDT team will get the job of completing the task and Inventor can sit on the bench and watch the ball game.
 

R. Paul Waddington
cadWest.