Steve's Junk » solidworks

Plastic Part Design

smackaay — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:50:55 +0000

In short, I’ve finished the reverse engineering of an enclosure. It was more work than I expected but all of the draft angles check out and the drawing is workable for changes. Here are some pictures.

whew! Doesn’t look like much but it was a bit of a challenge. Looking forward to more challenging drawing projects.

Playing around, drawing a valve.

smackaay — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 07:05:24 +0000

I was a little bored today so I decided to draw a valve. While the dimensions are entirely drawn from my head and the valve itself wouldn’t be very efficient, I like the look of gas compressor valves. It took me a couple of hours to draw but they look OK.

I didn’t tag them or describe them. There is a seat, a guard and a valve plate. I omitted the dowel pin, bolt, center nub and lock nut. I just wanted to see what it looked like in solids.

Been almost 2 years at Endura

smackaay — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:34:09 +0000

Now that It’s coming up on two years at the place I work, I was looking through some of the drawings. I figured it’d be fun to post some of them. I’ll simply place a gallery here, click the images to see a more detailed description

Note that these aren’t all of my drawings, but a decent selection of them.

Creating a strain gage coupling

smackaay — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:55:13 +0000

So now I have to find some way of measuring the torque applied between the two shafts of the viscometer. Here’s my idea.

Strain Coupling Model View

What you can’t see is that I plan to manufacture it out of plastic, that way the strain gage experiences the most out of the deflection of the part. I’ll use a flexible polyurethane bonding agent for the strain gages, allowing the forces of the strain to work without breaking the bond.

Here’s a through model view:

Strain Coupling Transparent View

Of course, it only took me a few minute to make this model but it helped me see if what I was doing would work, I also used FEA to see if the forces would be transmitted where I wanted them. The FEA results were promising, nice even strain along the gage surfaces. (Those gauge surfaces are seen in light blue). You can see though that the hole through the side relieves some strain on the strain area, though, this shouldn’t be an issue.

Strain Coupling Strain Test view

Here’s an image of the stress as calculated by Cosmos

Strain Coupling Stress Test view

Well, hopefully this will work. First I need to get the strain gages to provide reliable results. By using two of them, temperature concerns should no longer be an issue and should help mitigate innacuracies. I’ll post pictures of the finished part, though I don’t think I’ll do it on the NC, I’ll just do it manually, it may look like ass