A 3D Printing Experience

[JimG]

How did you draw the model hinges to provide a realistic representation of the prototype?

The joys of 3D CAD. The hinge straps on the top doors have a slightly complex shape. Here's the details from the Charles Roberts' microfiche drawings



Apologies for the quality but it is still readable when zoomed in.

The side elevation was sketched in Solid Edge, drawn to scale from the given dimensions.




The sketch was then extruded by 1mm to generate the hinge strap. In all it probably took about fifteen minutes to draw this part up - maybe even quicker. Although there was a bit of previous work drawing the basics of a side elevation sketch of the whole top door assembly to use as a base to draw the individual parts.


The two hinge straps in place on the hinges and the supporting angle. All the other bits for the top door assembly were made in a similar way and also quite quickly. My holdup was orientating parts to be parallel in Solid Edge. I persisted with trying to use the parallel function in the Assembly process with no success at all until I eventually found that I could achieve parallelism using plane alignment with floating offset. I'll find out what the parallel alignment function does some day.

So I reckon this is one of the big advantages of 3D CAD/3D Printing - being able to draw something to scale given good source data and then reproducing it relatively easily. To scratchbuild these hinge straps would require quite a lot of work and I suspect a lot of modellers would probably get somewhere close with bits of strip.

Jim.

 

[Boyblunder]

Thanks again Jim, very helpful. I'm very grateful that I didn't catch the earlier version of the virus that you had, very nasty indeed. It is strange how this latest strain seems to effect people so differently but fortunately most of us seem to get over it in a couple of weeks or a few days for the younger ones.