Inventor Content Centre: Using Standard Parts and Fasteners in Your Designs
Every mechanical assembly contains standard components: bolts, nuts, washers, bearings, O-rings, keys, retaining rings, pins. Modelling these from scratch for every design would be an enormous waste of time, and the results would inevitably be non-standard — slightly the wrong thread form, not quite the correct head height, a tolerance that doesn’t match the published standard. Inventor’s Content Centre solves this problem by providing a library of thousands of standard parts, fully parametric and conforming to their published dimensional standards, ready to place into any assembly in seconds. Understanding how to use and extend the Content Centre effectively is one of the most practical productivity skills an Inventor user can develop.
This guide covers the full Content Centre workflow: understanding its structure, placing standard fasteners and components, customising placement options, adding custom components to the library, and using the Content Centre in conjunction with the Design Accelerator tools.
Autodesk Inventor Professional is available from GetRenewedTech at £39.99, with the full Content Centre library included.
What Is the Content Centre?
The Content Centre is Inventor’s built-in library of standard parts and features, accessed through the Place from Content Centre command in the assembly environment. It contains components organised by category and standard, covering:
- Fasteners: Bolts, screws, nuts, washers, studs — covering ISO, DIN, BS, ANSI, JIS standards
- Structural sections: I-beams, channels, angles, hollow sections from BS, EN, AISC, and other standards
- Power transmission: Keys, keyways, retaining rings, circlips, pins, shafts
- Bearings: Ball bearings, roller bearings, thrust bearings to ISO and DIN standards
- Seals: O-rings, shaft seals, gaskets
- Pipe fittings: BSP, NPT, and metric pipe fittings
- Springs: Compression, extension, and torsion springs
- Pneumatic and hydraulic components: Cylinders, fittings, connectors
Each component is fully parametric — selecting a different size from the same family regenerates the geometry according to the standard’s dimensional table. A metric hex bolt M8×25 and M16×80 are both generated from the same parametric model; you simply select the size you need.
Placing Standard Fasteners
The most common use of the Content Centre is placing fasteners. In an assembly, navigate to the Assemble tab and click Place from Content Centre (or press the keyboard shortcut, typically ‘E’). The Content Centre browser opens.
Navigating the Browser
The left panel of the Content Centre browser shows the category tree. Expand Fasteners > Bolts > Hex Head to find metric hex bolts, or navigate to Fasteners > Nuts > Hex Nuts for the corresponding nuts. The standard filter at the top of the browser allows you to show only ISO, only DIN, or only BS components, avoiding confusion between similar components from different standards.
Selecting Size and Standard
Once you’ve found the correct component family, the right panel shows a table of available sizes with their dimensional parameters. For a metric hex bolt (ISO 4014), the table shows diameter, pitch, length, head height, wrench size, and other standard dimensions for each size. Select the row corresponding to your required size and click OK to place the component.
For UK projects, the ISO standard is generally preferred over DIN for new designs, as ISO 4014/4016/4017/4018 hex bolts are now the current European standard. DIN 931/933 remain in widespread use but are technically superseded. If you’re working to a client specification that mandates a specific standard, ensure your Content Centre filter matches it.
Automatic Hole Matching
When you place a fastener, Inventor can automatically detect clearance holes in the assembly that match the bolt diameter and use them to drive placement — the bolt snaps to the hole centreline and aligns with the face automatically. This feature, called Precise Placement, significantly speeds up fastener placement in assemblies with many bolt connections. You can also constrain the fastener manually using standard Inventor assembly constraints if the automatic detection doesn’t capture the correct position.
Using the Fastener Feature
For assemblies with multiple identical fastened connections — a flange with twelve M12 bolts, for example — placing and constraining each bolt individually is repetitive. The Fastener Feature (accessible from the Design tab) automates this. You specify the hole pattern, the fastener components (bolt, washer, nut), and Inventor places the complete fastener assembly at every hole simultaneously. If the hole pattern changes, the fastener feature updates accordingly.
The Fastener Feature also allows you to define the complete fastener stack — bolt, flat washer, spring washer, nut — as a single operation, and it places all components with the correct clearances and thread engagements automatically.
Bearings, Keys, and Seals
Beyond fasteners, the Content Centre provides genuine value for placing bearings, keys, circlips, and seals.
Bearings
Navigate to Shaft Parts > Bearings > Ball Bearings > Single Row Deep Groove to find ISO 6200-series deep groove ball bearings. Select by bore diameter and series (6200, 6300 for light/medium duty, 6000 series for particularly light loads). Inventor places the bearing as a parametric model matching the published FAG/SKF/NSK dimensional envelope — outer diameter, width, bore diameter — so the bearing housing and shaft dimensions can be derived from it.
For design purposes, the bearing model in Inventor is a simplified representation (a cylinder with the correct outer dimensions rather than a detailed rolling element model) that is appropriate for assembly clearance checking and drawing production. Full bearing simulation requires specialist bearing analysis software, but the Inventor representation is sufficient for interference detection and general arrangement work.
Keys and Keyways
Parallel keys (ISO 773) and Woodruff keys (ISO 3912) are available under Shaft Parts > Shaft Keys. When placing a key, Inventor can automatically create the corresponding keyway features in the shaft and hub parts — select the shaft, select the hub bore, specify the key size, and Inventor cuts the keyways and places the key, all in one operation.
O-Rings
O-rings are placed from Seals > O-Rings, with sizes from ISO 3601 and other standards. The O-ring model is a torus with the correct cross-section diameter and inner diameter. Placing the O-ring in a groove also allows you to check that the groove dimensions (depth and width) correspond to the standard recommendations for the O-ring size and operating pressure, since undersized grooves result in excessive compression and premature seal failure.
Customising the Content Centre
The default Content Centre content covers the major international standards, but real engineering organisations often use a specific subset of standard parts combined with proprietary or semi-proprietary components. Inventor allows you to customise and extend the Content Centre in several ways.
Custom Libraries
You can create a custom Content Centre library alongside the standard library. In the Content Centre editor (accessed via Manage > Content Centre > Edit Content Centre), you can add new component families by:
- Defining the parametric Inventor part that drives the family
- Creating the table of standard sizes (the tabulated parameters)
- Assigning the family to a category in the library tree
- Setting the default placement options and constraint types
Once published to the custom library, your proprietary components appear alongside standard Content Centre items and can be placed using the same workflow. This is particularly valuable for organisations that have standard sub-assemblies or components used across many projects — a specific type of terminal block, a proprietary coupling, or a custom fastener that appears in every design.
Editing Standard Sizes
If your organisation only uses a subset of a standard’s size range — say, M6, M8, M10, and M12 bolts, never smaller and rarely larger — you can edit the standard family to display only those sizes in the browser. This prevents engineers from specifying non-standard sizes that would complicate procurement and inventory management.
Content Centre and the Bill of Materials
One of the significant advantages of using Content Centre parts is their integration with the assembly BOM. Every Content Centre component carries the correct iProperties: part number, description, standard reference, and material. These populate the BOM automatically without any manual data entry.
A hex bolt placed from the Content Centre will appear in the BOM as “Hex Bolt ISO 4014 — M10 × 50 — Grade 8.8 — Zinc Plated” rather than “PART_0047” or some other meaningless reference. This makes BOM-to-procurement a far more straightforward process, and it eliminates the risk of a purchasing department buying the wrong grade or coating because the drawing annotation was ambiguous.
BOM Exclusion for Simplified Models
In large assemblies, you may want to simplify the model for performance — replacing all fasteners with lightweight representations or suppressing them entirely during early design stages. Inventor allows you to exclude individual components from the BOM without deleting them, and to define substitute representations that swap detailed models for simplified ones at the drawing or performance analysis stage. Content Centre parts participate in this substitution mechanism in the same way as custom components.
Content Centre vs iParts
Inventor has another mechanism for parametric parts: iParts, which are custom tabulated part families you create from scratch. The distinction from Content Centre is worth clarifying:
- Content Centre: For standard parts that conform to published dimensional standards. The Content Centre manages the catalogue infrastructure — browsing, filtering by standard, automatic table generation. Use this for fasteners, bearings, structural sections, seals.
- iParts: For proprietary custom parts that have multiple standard configurations. An iPart for a custom bracket might have variants A, B, and C with different hole patterns and lengths but the same basic form. iParts don’t use the Content Centre browser but are placed directly from the assembly Place Component command. Use iParts for company-standard custom components.
In practice, a well-structured Inventor organisation uses both: Content Centre for true standard parts, and iParts for company-standard custom components.
Design Accelerator Integration
The Design Accelerator tools in Inventor — for shafts, gears, belts, springs, and other mechanical elements — work alongside the Content Centre. For example, the Bolted Connection Calculator under Design Accelerator allows you to specify the joint load and select the required strength grade, and it then recommends an appropriate bolt size and quantity. The recommended fastener is then placed directly from the Content Centre as a real parametric component, ensuring that what’s in the model matches the calculated requirement.
Similarly, the Bearing Calculator allows you to input load, speed, and desired service life, and it identifies which ISO bearing series and bore size will meet the requirement. Placing the selected bearing from the Content Centre completes the loop from analysis to model.
Managing Content Centre on a Network
In a multi-user environment, the Content Centre library should reside on a shared network location rather than individual workstations. This ensures everyone uses the same version of the library, and custom additions or modifications are immediately available to all users. Configure the Content Centre library path via Application Options > Content Centre > Configure Content Centre Libraries and point all workstations to the same shared path.
When upgrading Inventor to a new release, verify that the Content Centre library is compatible with the new version. Autodesk typically provides updated libraries for each release that include corrections to published dimensional standards and any new standard families added for that year.
Summary
The Content Centre is one of Inventor’s most underutilised yet most productive features. By eliminating the need to model standard fasteners, bearings, seals, and structural sections from scratch, it saves significant time, eliminates modelling errors, and ensures that the BOM data is accurate and meaningful from the start of a project. Learning to use it effectively — including creating custom libraries for company-standard components — is one of the highest-return investments an Inventor user can make in their workflow.
If you’re ready to take full advantage of Inventor’s Content Centre and the broader Inventor toolset, Autodesk Inventor Professional is available from GetRenewedTech at £39.99. For teams working across design and manufacturing, the Autodesk PDMC Collection at £149.99 provides the complete Autodesk product design and manufacturing suite in one package.
