Hi all,
I am wondering whether somebody would be able to help me or advise the best possible way of modelling a torch body for rotational or injection moulding?
My knowledge of 3d surfacing is minimal and I am trying to achieve a model which can be easily modified in terms of body may need to increase in volume for adding additional parts. And also handle angle can be modified to produce various shapes. I wanted to create the body and then shell to give me a uniform thickness but I am getting some weird and wonderful error messages which I am bemused by.
I initially wanted to do the body in 4 parts front, Body, Joining section (which is currently sweeps and a bad join - see attached sldprt) and handle. But I am wondering whether I should make the model as two seperate parts left / right side etc
Any help or advice would be greatfully received,
Many Thanks,
Grahame
For injection mold, you'll need to split the part in half, side by side. Rotomolding you can probably mold as is, but might want to split off a couple of parts for assembly of reflector and battery. On a part like this, I would model the entire thing as a single part, and then later split it into the separate pieces.
If you are going to add draft, you might consider removing fillets from sketches and make them features at the end of the tree.
Sweep3 is a feature that I would probably replace with a loft. The loft can be as simple as a start sketch and an end sketch. I think that will give you the shape for the back side of the lens.
So far what you have is pretty standard parametric solid modeling, so the changes you ask about should be easy enough.
Troubleshooting shells is tough work, and not always obvious. Things like Sweep3 will cause problems with shells that you can't expect to work, but the rest of the model looks good enough. The handle sweep should maybe be a single profile instead of a nested profile.
Best of luck.