Customizing Threads in Inventor

Have you ever wished that you could find more thread designations when using the Hole tool or the Thread tool in Inventor?  Well it is easier than you think to add your own custom thread designations, so let’s dive in and learn how.

Normally, when you work on placing threaded holes, or adding internal or external threads using the Thread tool, you are limited to the thread designations available in the Thread.xls spreadsheet that comes with Inventor.  There are a good amount of standard type threads, but sometimes, you just need a special designation.  Or maybe, you always use a very specialized thread and need to have it available in the Thread Type drop-down list.

The default location for the Thread.xls file is: C:UsersPublicPublic DocumentsAutodeskInventor 2014Design DataXLSen-US.  We need to open this file in Excel.

Once opened, you will notice that there are about seventeen worksheet tabs which represent the various thread types available. The very first tab is the ANSI Unified Screw Threads.  We’ll select that tab, then right-mouse click on it, and select Move or Copy…

In the next dialog box, select the check box to “Create a copy” and in the “Before sheet:” section, select the ANSI Metric M Profile, to place the copied worksheet as the #2 tab.

Before we do any work on the worksheet, we need to rename it so that we won’t cause any problems when trying to designate our thread type in Inventor.  Right mouse click on the newly copied worksheet and click on Rename.  For this  example, we’ll rename the tab to ACME.

Next, we’ll rename cell B1 in the worksheet to ACME.  You’ll notice that cell B1 is the cell used by Inventor to list the thread category.

Now we’ll want to delete the data in the ACME worksheet so that we can populate it with the correct ACME thread data.

Save the Excel file and re-launch Inventor.  You will now be able to access your newly created custom threads!