Cordless Drill - An Additive Loft Example
Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2019 6:03 pm
Cordless Drill. The handle was made with many sketches and the additive loft tool.
FreeCAD rules! Thank you so much for creating this software.
To Kunda1
Thank you for your feedback. I have to admit I don't know how to create a thread
But I thought I can answer your request right here in this post, also not to spam this thread with a lot of entries.
I use FreeCAD now for some years, just for a hobby. Mostley to dig into some Ideas. First Version I used was 0.14. Since then FreeCAD really evolved a lot! One major struggle for me was the big change, when 0.17 came out, and I had to merge old creations or even reconstruct them, because of the way FreeCAD was changed at that time. At first I felt a little helpless, but now I'm glad the developers made this big step forward.
Now I'm using 0.19, which again introduces some astonishing tools (like 'linking',...). This helps tremendousley to realize cool stuff.
So FreeCAD, for me is constant learning and experimenting. Gladly there's this wonderful communitiy of people that's posting own experiences, tutorials, etc...
Now: To the objective
This Drill, I made more for a presentation for another project. Therefore it is only the body, without the insides. (Anyways, gave me some headaches
)
FreeCAD Version: FreeCAD_0.19-18846-Linux-Conda_Py3Qt5_glibc2.12-x86_64 (Currently the most recent - He he)
Platform :Linux Mint 19.1 - KDE Plasma Desktop - Laptop Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4720HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz / NVIDIA GTX960M (already an old machine again
)
1 First thing I made was the akkumulator. I didn't use any direct reference, cause I didn't care about originality.
2 To get the handle right I took 2 images of my Cordless Drill and used the Image WB to get them into FreeCAD.
(Of course some image editing was necessary to get rid of the background.To preserve the transparency I used the PNG format for the pictures).
3 Now it was possible to use 2 sketches as guiding lines, while placing the loft-sketches verticaly more or less aligned to them. (For multiple lofting it's quite essential that the sketches are basicaly not too different in form! I mostley used a little transformed routing-sketch-object, )
4 Additive Loft: The Additive Loft Tool lets you extrude from sketch to sketch. Basically it is like connecting cut-throughs of whatever you like to create. There is a diffuculty though. As far as I understand, when you're NOT using the 'Ruled' option, the created faces are smoothed out. BUT, they behave as there is a kind of 'tension' between the cuts. Imagine bending a bamboo stick between some poles.. the more poles you bring in, AND the closer they are, the more tension is on the bamboo. At one point it's not possible to bend it against another pole anymore. In FreeCAD the smoothed out version of the AdditiveLoft is doing quite the same. The more Sketches you bring in, the more it gets missformed. Therefore I used 3 Additive Lofts after one another, while using the last sketch of the earlier Loft to start the next Loft. That's when they (seemingly) connect almost unvisible. The last Additive Loft though kind of misbehaved, and I wasn't able to fix that. So I ended the 2nd AddLft a bit above the 3rd, to have a closed surface.
As far as I understand, there is a 'tension' regulation in the algorythm of AddLfts, that changes (metaphorically speaking: releases the tension), when you use more than 10 sketches. But in my experience I had the impression, that it actually gets much stronger. (Note to the developers: Maybe whatever you mystificialy mathematically do, I guess the operand that controls the average smoothing, should be the opposite of what it is now- just a naively wild guess... furhtermore a regulatory control option for that operand would be totaly cool to have ).
5 Wellllll,, the rest isn't that wild. To achieve the 2 colors. I copied the whole handle and base part-object and did 2 cuts with the same sketch. One cuts out the lower part and one the upper.
One gets black and one blue. Voila.
6 The rest of the Drill is just some typical basic forms, cuts, polar arrays, etc.. The only thing I like to mention here too, is the very nice makro, called 'circular text', that's available through the add-on installer. With this the numbers were made and aligned to the friction control(?) of the drill.
So that's it. Hopefully I could answer your question.
FreeCAD rules! Thank you so much for creating this software.
- Drill with UX
- Screenshot_20191216_025440.png (361.8 KiB) Viewed 4919 times
To Kunda1
Please create your own thread in this subforum, if you don't mind. Explain full version of FreeCAD, how did you achieve this, lessons learned etc...
Thank you for your feedback. I have to admit I don't know how to create a thread
But I thought I can answer your request right here in this post, also not to spam this thread with a lot of entries.
I use FreeCAD now for some years, just for a hobby. Mostley to dig into some Ideas. First Version I used was 0.14. Since then FreeCAD really evolved a lot! One major struggle for me was the big change, when 0.17 came out, and I had to merge old creations or even reconstruct them, because of the way FreeCAD was changed at that time. At first I felt a little helpless, but now I'm glad the developers made this big step forward.
Now I'm using 0.19, which again introduces some astonishing tools (like 'linking',...). This helps tremendousley to realize cool stuff.
So FreeCAD, for me is constant learning and experimenting. Gladly there's this wonderful communitiy of people that's posting own experiences, tutorials, etc...
Now: To the objective
This Drill, I made more for a presentation for another project. Therefore it is only the body, without the insides. (Anyways, gave me some headaches
)FreeCAD Version: FreeCAD_0.19-18846-Linux-Conda_Py3Qt5_glibc2.12-x86_64 (Currently the most recent - He he)
Platform :Linux Mint 19.1 - KDE Plasma Desktop - Laptop Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4720HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz / NVIDIA GTX960M (already an old machine again
)1 First thing I made was the akkumulator. I didn't use any direct reference, cause I didn't care about originality.
2 To get the handle right I took 2 images of my Cordless Drill and used the Image WB to get them into FreeCAD.
(Of course some image editing was necessary to get rid of the background.To preserve the transparency I used the PNG format for the pictures).
3 Now it was possible to use 2 sketches as guiding lines, while placing the loft-sketches verticaly more or less aligned to them. (For multiple lofting it's quite essential that the sketches are basicaly not too different in form! I mostley used a little transformed routing-sketch-object, )
4 Additive Loft: The Additive Loft Tool lets you extrude from sketch to sketch. Basically it is like connecting cut-throughs of whatever you like to create. There is a diffuculty though. As far as I understand, when you're NOT using the 'Ruled' option, the created faces are smoothed out. BUT, they behave as there is a kind of 'tension' between the cuts. Imagine bending a bamboo stick between some poles.. the more poles you bring in, AND the closer they are, the more tension is on the bamboo. At one point it's not possible to bend it against another pole anymore. In FreeCAD the smoothed out version of the AdditiveLoft is doing quite the same. The more Sketches you bring in, the more it gets missformed. Therefore I used 3 Additive Lofts after one another, while using the last sketch of the earlier Loft to start the next Loft. That's when they (seemingly) connect almost unvisible. The last Additive Loft though kind of misbehaved, and I wasn't able to fix that. So I ended the 2nd AddLft a bit above the 3rd, to have a closed surface.
As far as I understand, there is a 'tension' regulation in the algorythm of AddLfts, that changes (metaphorically speaking: releases the tension), when you use more than 10 sketches. But in my experience I had the impression, that it actually gets much stronger. (Note to the developers: Maybe whatever you mystificialy mathematically do, I guess the operand that controls the average smoothing, should be the opposite of what it is now- just a naively wild guess... furhtermore a regulatory control option for that operand would be totaly cool to have
).5 Wellllll,, the rest isn't that wild. To achieve the 2 colors. I copied the whole handle and base part-object and did 2 cuts with the same sketch. One cuts out the lower part and one the upper.
One gets black and one blue. Voila.
6 The rest of the Drill is just some typical basic forms, cuts, polar arrays, etc.. The only thing I like to mention here too, is the very nice makro, called 'circular text', that's available through the add-on installer. With this the numbers were made and aligned to the friction control(?) of the drill.
So that's it. Hopefully I could answer your question.
- Creating the Drill
- CordlessDrill_Process.jpg (849.8 KiB) Viewed 4919 times
- A sight for sore eyes... ;)
- Screenshot_20191216_021656.png (221.68 KiB) Viewed 4919 times
amazing
. The macro does a good job. Otherwise it would be quite a pain to get letters arranged in any circular way.