  Starting with an ideal triangulation of the interior of a compact 3-manifold
M with boundary, no component of which is a 2-sphere, we provide a
construction, called an inflation of the ideal triangulation, to obtain a
strongly related triangulations of M itself. Besides a step-by-step algorithm
for such a construction, we provide examples of an inflation of the
two-tetrahedra ideal triangulation of the complement of the figure-eight knot
in the 3-sphere, giving a minimal triangulation, having ten tetrahedra, of the
figure-eight knot exterior. As another example, we provide an inflation of the
one-tetrahedron Gieseking manifold giving a minimal triangulation, having seven
tetrahedra, of a nonorientable compact 3-manifold with Klein bottle boundary.
Several applications of inflations are discussed.
