Monday, February 18, 2013

Windlass Part II: Another SolidWorks Adventure

Ashley joined Hannah and me at the SolidWorks stage; we worked in class on 2/15 and came in on Sunday to finish (see Windlass Part III).
We spent too many hours working on this part:
The dimensions had to be perfect, and the SmartDimensions were a little tricky sometimes, but we persevered and eventually made everything fit nicely.  The middle circle, when cut out, will be the bearing for the two Delrin rods (a snug fit around the rods to provide structural support); we'll make a few more bushings with slightly larger outer radii to keep the bearings in place and serve as a handle to easily turn the axle. (We'll make two of the front face pieces, one for each side; see the cardboard mock-up photos in Windlass Part I.)
The final front face (x2):
The final base piece (x4):
The front face's three pegs will fit in the three holes on the base piece; the middle hole is for the lengthwise support (heat staked with the T), and the hole farthest right is for the trapezoid support.
The final lengthwise support (x2):
We built this part at least four times:
I tried to do magic with similar triangles, but things quickly got complicated because we really had to work with similar trapezoids.  In the end, we used the same angles and modified the lengths based on what we measured in the Assembly phase of SolidWorks.
The final support for the trapezoid faces (x2):
The peg to heat-stake together the lengthwise supports (x4):
We carefully measured the holes to match the heat-stake machine, 5.45 mm by the 4.56 mm Delrin thickness of our claimed sheet.
After much thinking and pondering and a little bit of head-banging when VirtualBox gave us the Blue Screen of Death, we moved on to Assemble the pieces in SolidWorks (and iterated back from there a bit).

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