Class 2/1/13

Much to my dismay, EXTD 160 no longer fit in my lab partner Laura's schedule, so I was sadly alone for the first part of class.  Happily, Dana joined on Friday, so together we ventured forth to continue the bottle opener saga!
Dana approved of my design, so we spent most of this class trying to put it into SolidWorks.
We wanted the part to look like this:

Unfortunately, it spent much of its time looking like this:

We weren't really sure what happened, but basically my first forays into SolidWorks were...less than successful.  Our wonderful TA Essie (one of many amazing supplemental instructors) showed us how to make curves much more easily with the fillet tool, and patiently fiddled with things when they continuously failed to work.  For some reason, when we tried to trim away parts of the original large ellipse base we had used as a guideline for the part, more ellipses would pop up, and the curved spaces for the fingers would completely change.  We think the main problem was SolidWorks incorrectly defining the relationships between all the different ellipses, though the repeated appearance of extra ellipses remains a mystery.  After spending almost the entire class fussing with SolidWorks to get the curves the right sizes and orientations and attempting in vain to remove the guide ellipse, we discussed our problems with Professor Turback, who had many interesting ideas about what might be wrong but was unfortunately unable to help much.  Class ended with slightly dampened spirits, as we envied the many groups that had already printed out their designs on the laser cutter and were happily opening and re-opening their soda bottles.  But Dana and I found a time to meet with Essie outside of class to work with the program some more, and we were hopeful that we would soon enjoy a similar success.