And now through Chapter 12

Over the past couple weeks I have continued to work through our 3D Modeling Exercise book, and I just finished Chapter 12, the last chapter of the book. In addition to beginning to create drawing of the models in Inventor, the last 6 chapters were much more complex than the first 6, obviously, and required much more complex tools. These tools were pieced together in Chapter 11, when I created the Dryer Housing.

Dryer Housing

Chapter 12 introduced the concept of assemblies, which took much more work than a single model. The Shaft Support Assembly is a good example of this as it consisted of 5 different parts which all had to be created and drawn seperately, and then assembled together.

Shaft Support Assembly

I am now starting working on creating models of real-life objects and animating. I'll update some of my animations and rendered images later.

Chapters 1-6 Complete!

Last week I completed the first section of the 3D Modeling work, Chapters 1-6, and I've picked what I believe to be my best work in this section.

This model was particularly challenging due to the odd shape of the center bar, as well as the fact that the top piece had no clear base point, which made it difficult to center. In the end, I made each side of the top piece separately, based off of the center bar. I also started by making the center bar a complete rectangular solid; I then cut off what I didn't need.

This was one of the first times I had used fillets, which are the rounded edges on the sides of the model. These are applied after the object is completed, and I had some fun filleting different parts of the model to see what it would look like.

Finally, I applied a nice Metal-Gold Material onto the model to make it look fancy. Heheh

Thanks for reading, I'll be back with more later.

~Alex

Special Project Friday - Bonus Project

As an additional project to Friday's School Analysis Project, I measured the distances from Wheeler High School to each other school in the list. To do this, I plugged each address into a Map program I have, and found the latitude and longitude of each school. I then used an online latitude/longitude calculator to find the Great Circle distance between Wheeler and each of the other coordinates. This actually resulted in a kilometer distance, so I used an online kilometer-to-mile calculator for personal preference.

Great Circle Latitude/Longitude Calculator
Kilometer-to-Mile Calculator (As well as a ton of other distance conversions)

Special Project Friday

On Friday we did a project involving Google Docs, Google Maps, Map Apps, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Paint. The goal was to compare logistics, such as the total population, of the area surrounding various schools. We made a chart in Excel that showed one or more of the traits.

Start of the Semester - Tolerancing and Threads

• I started off this semester by learning the details of how tolerancing works and how to draw threads. The tolerance worksheets look pretty boring, but here's the one thread we did on AutoCAD.
• This thread took me a while, mostly because drawing the outside of a bolt is different than drawing the inside of a nut. An inside thread is alot more linear and looks less like an actual thread, but it easier to see what kind of thread it is. I was particularly pleased with how smooth the end of the bolt was.
• The line of text above the bolt is thread jargon to explain what kind of thread it is.

~Alex