Brake rotor

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cblt2l
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Joined: Sat May 15, 2010 3:59 am

Brake rotor

Post by cblt2l »

Here is an automotive brake rotor I threw together a few weeks back. Creating the shapes was pretty easy, however placing them i.e. assembling the rotor was slightly painful. Basically I went in and manually edited the positions for each piece to achieve the desired rotor shape. Looking back, I could probably have just revolved a profile. But anyway, I'm really looking forward to the assembly module :mrgreen:

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jmaustpc
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Re: Show your FreeCAD projects here!

Post by jmaustpc »

cblt2l wrote:Creating the shapes was pretty easy, however placing them i.e. assembling the rotor was slightly painful. Basically I went in and manually edited the positions for each piece to achieve the desired rotor shape. Looking back, I could probably have just revolved a profile. But anyway, I'm really looking forward to the assembly module :mrgreen:
Looks great!

About the placement, yes you could have revolved a profile, and assembly will be great ....... but making and placing the primitives for this hub purely in "part" need not have been too painful. All the parts have the same axle position you only have to move them in one plane, except the stud holes. If you just make the whole thing in the default 0,0,0 position then once the whole thing is finished "fuse" all the component and move the fusion to wherever you want it.

If you were modeling a car, I would make the hub as a separate project and then use "merge project" from the file menu, to "suck it into" the main model.

But you are correct, FreeCAD is great but not "QUITE perfect" yet, I believe "perfect" is a feature that the guy are going implement next week. :lol:

Jim
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cblt2l
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Re: Show your FreeCAD projects here!

Post by cblt2l »

Painful may have been a bit much, as it wasn't that bad. I basically did what you described in my placement of the parts. It just seems a little crude manually placing the solids with coordinates. But I don't mean to complain, its still an impressive piece of software. The assembly module will make it perfect :P
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NormandC
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Re: Show your FreeCAD projects here!

Post by NormandC »

You know, the few times I've had to place parts together, I've used the Draft workbench. That's right, even though it's a 2D workbench, editing commands work on 3D solids too! You can use move, rotate... And with the Draft Module's point snapping, it's very similar to placing objects in AutoCAD. If I want to place my object at some specific coordinates, I draw a Draft Line that starts or finishes on this point and move & snap my 3D solid to it.

What I've been waiting for in FreeCAD are the Sketcher, the PartDesign and the Assembly modules. But even when they'll be close to feature-complete, I'm sure I'll continue using Yorik's Draft Module. It's like FreeCAD's swiss knife. :)

And that's FreeCAD's strong point, it's modular and everything is interconnected. :)
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