posted Jul 20, 2009 6:59 AM by Kyle Mason
The end is near! The end is near! No, I'm not preaching a 2012 demise... I am approaching the end of this project. Great time for the end to be closing in because I am 78 hours into my original 100 hour quote. It is also good timing because I might not be able to work on projects like these anymore. It seems like I have worked on this project for longer than I have. It actually started back on June 1st of 2008 but I've only worked on it for 78 hours which works out to about 2 work weeks. So the end is getting closer. Well to start this post off recently I was laid off from my full time job which ya know, sucks... but the silver lining is that I get time to finally get at this project and try to finish it up. I have been making a considerable amount of progress. Before starting this session of work I had a lot of the surfaces drawn and in place but they didn't really look exactly the way I wanted them to. Some of the problems were remedied as easily as changing a tangent influence to a curvature continuous influence. Others were fixed by adding a connector. Some however required a bit more work. Most of the features, like I said, were already in place. One that wasn't (or two because it is mirrored on both sides of the car) was the vent behind the front wheel well. It can be seen (barely) in the image to the right. As you can tell the Coupe is moving along and soon should be reaching it's end. I'm still not exactly sure what the next step is for the coupe. I know who I'm drawing it for but not exactly sure what the purpose is. I'll have to get in contact with him soon to see what he wants to do with it though. If unemployment has done me any favors, its finally given me the time to work on this project and finish it up. Finish it just in time as well! So that is the latest update. I am hoping to go work on it tomorrow for a decent amount of time and see how close I can get to finishing it all up.
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posted Jul 2, 2009 10:10 AM by Kyle Mason
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updated Jul 2, 2009 10:48 AM
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It's been a little while... I know. I actually have worked on the Coupe a little bit since my last post but I didn't have time to write about it. Some other things (Senior Project, work, school) got in the way of working on this project so it was put on the back burner for a while. But now that I've got some time to work on it I hope to finish pretty soon.
This session was more of the same. I am adding surfaces, refining them, trimming them, deleting them, doing them again AAHHH! A lot of that. It is coming along. I have the area around the door and window modeled, the scoop behind the window and I just finished up the concave dome that seals the back of the body. I've been modeling by eye more and more. I initially thought that is kind of like cheating but that's exactly what Pete Brock and the guys that made the coupe did originally. So I am using as much of the measurements from the car that I can but anything that I don't have measured I'm just going by eye. I'm not just modeling what looks best, I'm inserting pictures of the car and using that as reference.
Oh and please excuse the horrible renderings. I don't want to spend the time right now dialing in a good quality rendering. I would render using PV360 but the school doesn't have that yet. So there ya have it, work is still continuing and the end is approaching. So stay tuned... |
posted Feb 11, 2009 7:06 PM by Kyle Mason
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updated Feb 11, 2009 7:58 PM
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More work on the Coupe...Ahhh yes. For some reason it was quite a relief to get working on this project again. Last time I worked on the car I made some real headway with the front clip. Up to that session I always had a doubt in the back of my mind that this kind of surface work was going to be possible in SolidWorks...at least by me anyway. After I created a single surface that fully encompassed the front clip I had a boost in ambition and couldn't wait to get back on it.
Now, the front isn't done, I'll admit. It still needs some refinement & some smoothing in certain places, but it's far enough that I felt I should move to another part of the car and come back to do the final touches. Could be a mistake, could be smart...not sure. E-mail me if u have an opinion, or let me know on twitter. Regardless, I made a trip to the shop & whipped out the ol' tape measure and angle finder and went to town.
If you read about how I measured the front of the car you know what a process that was. I went a different direction with the rear of the car. For the front of the car I had the body taped into 6" squares and measured every intersection. The reason I did this was that the original prints from Shelby were not very detailed in that area. The rear of the car, however, doesn't have as many curves and details as the front. I will be able to use the sections from the prints for this section. The measurements I needed were to locate the print sections in relation to the front clip. I basically just measured the center-line of the car from the front of the windscreen back to the rear of the car. I also measured the door details & windscreen to hopefully add them in next time I work on the car.
So the car progresses, I'm hoping to get this done as soon as I can, because along with this project I also have a little thing called a Senior Project that has to be done... apparently it's a big deal around here. My senior project is going to be on using simulation software on parts and designs, so maybe I will be able to run some Computational Fluid Dynamics on the car, see how the air flows around the body. I bet Pete Brock & Carrol Shelby would have loved to have that capability back in the 60's when they were building the car.
Next up for the coupe will be trying to model the windscreen and doors. I have most of the dimensions I need for them so hopefully it will go smoothly...doubt it.
Side Note: I made some updates to my main website. Check it out here. If you enjoy this project, check out the F1 Nose I modeled in SolidWorks. I printed it on the school's Zcorp 310 3D printer, it looks pretty slick but the wing is very fragile. A full album of pictures of the prototype can be seen here. |
posted Dec 14, 2008 7:38 PM by Kyle Mason
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updated Dec 14, 2008 8:14 PM
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It's been a little while since my last update on the coupe project...well to be honest, its been way too long. I actually had to make an awkward call letting the customer know that I was having trouble finding time to work on the car.
The problem was all of the other work that I had going on at school. Between my regular job and my second to last semester of school, I just couldn't find a decent chunk of time to take and work on it. I did however find a day...two days after my last final.
This session went a lot better than I had expected it to. I hadn't worked on the car in something like four months and I hadn't really thought of what I needed to do to the model. I made a lot of progress regardless of all that. One thing that helped was Matt Lombard's surfacing book. I met Matt while at the Happy Valley SolidWorks Users Group Meeting. Thanks to Randall Bock for setting up a great meeting, and Matt for giving a very interesting presentation. You can read about the meeting here. His Presentation that night was all about surfacing and was very helpful for this project. I haven't had a chance to completely read the surfacing book but from what I have read it is a good source and well worth the money. You can purchase the book here.
I worked on the front clip again. Before this session I had the middle of the clip pretty much done and just needed to work on the fairings that cover the front wheels. This time while I worked on the car I took some ideas that I learned at the users group and applied them and things went a lot quicker. I spent less time worrying about how my splines were constrained and how parametric the model was and spent more time on just getting the form down and creating the surfaces needed. You will be able to tell that some of the features don't match the car too well and some features are missing but it is a start and needs refining.
The cut-outs for the headlights are the main feature that is incorrect. I added them in the last five minutes of working and they were purely aesthetic. I have the measurements and will add them in correctly, as well as the wheel wells and lower lights.
Just getting the surface to be formed the way I wanted it to was a big achievement for me. The section underneath the headlight is one area in particular that I thought might ruin this whole project, but now that I know it can be done I feel more confident, and more ambitious about the project as a whole.
So next will be fine tuning the surface and adding in some of the missing features. Hopefully this time it won't take another four months to get to it.
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posted Aug 21, 2008 7:03 AM by Kyle Mason
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Work still progresses on the coupe project, albeit not as fast as I'd like. It took so long to finally get started measuring the car that now that I'm finally started on the CAD work, I'm also starting my 7th semester at college. Although I am carrying a lighter load of credits this semester, I am also starting my senior project this semester. Quite a lot of things going on all at once. But, on to the car... Last time I worked on it I put all of the points that we measured off of the body into sketches. This worked when the surface was long and sweeping, with all relatively large radii. The very front of the clip is different, and needed a different approach. What we did to obtain the profiles was an idea I had, but I had probably seen it somewhere before. I took welding rod (I'm not sure what size) and meticulously bent and curved the rod so that when placed parallel with one of the longitudinal sections it matched the profile of the body. Rinse & Repeat, I bent welding rod for each long. section and marked off where certain features were, for example the radiator inlet and headlight.
 The only problem with bending welding rod to match the different profiles was that there is no real way to numerically get the profiles into CAD. What I decided on doing was to trace each profile onto a large piece of paper, and then have that paper scanned and converted to a jpeg file. After I had that I used a program called GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) to crop the sections from the others. After that I just put the sketch pictures onto their respective planes and traced them with a spline. Now comes the hard part. I have lots of data, and profiles galore, now I just have to loft all of the data together to create a nice, smooth surface. Should be nice, easy, and problem-free right?...more to come |
posted Aug 11, 2008 9:32 AM by Kyle Mason
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updated Aug 11, 2008 10:02 AM
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This past weekend was the first time I really sat down and worked on the CAD model. Originally I had used the print from Pete Brock at Shelby to do a simple loft, but it just isn't accurate enough, the front clip only has about 4 sections to use. After measuring the points on the car, I had 5 sections longitudinally with 11 sections latitudinally (lot of 'tudinally's, I know). The first thing I did was put the information into a spreadsheet because I had initially thought that I would use those values directly. The more I thought about it the more I realized that there weren't that many points and I could just add them manually. Besides, I would only have to add 11 points in a sketch and then copy/paste it 5 times.
Adding the data was actually relatively painless. Solidworks' "Fully Define Sketch..." feature worked wonders here. Josh over at Solidsmack.com has a good post about that tool. I added all of the points for one long. section and constrained them to the lat. sections, then ran the Fully Define Sketch tool. I picked my zero point and then Solidworks added the dimensions automatically and all I had to do was put in the right values. Easy as pie, although I've never made a pie so I can't tell you how easy that is, I'd say it was easier than pie.
What I ended up with was basically a skeleton of what the surface will lie on. I left some of the sections from the Shelby Print on just for visual reference. I tried lofting a surface at this point but found that I need height dimensions for another important line on the car. So, more dimensions, more data, more progress. |
posted Jul 29, 2008 8:47 AM by Kyle Mason
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updated Jul 31, 2008 8:29 AM
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| Yesterday I went to the shop and measured the nose of the car. This part of the car that has the most curves. I started out thinking that I could take a piece of cardboard and just cut and trim untill I matched the curves of the particular section, but that would be too time consuming. What I ended up doing is taking some welding rod that they had at the shop and bending that to conform to the radii of the car untill it fit without any springback. I did this for every longitudinal section (Mid,+1,+2,+3,+4) and also did it for the eleventh latitudinal section. After all of the sections were formed to the body, I traced them onto a piece of paper and will then scan them in and paste the images directly onto a sketch. |
posted Jul 22, 2008 7:50 AM by Kyle Mason
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updated Jul 22, 2008 8:22 AM
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Finally got over to the race shop to start measuring the Coupe. The shop is a really cool place, not really the building but how many cool cars are there. When I first got there I helped them push a Grand Sport (unfinished) into their trailer, then they pulled out the Coupe. After that we pushed in another car, I wasn't sure what make it was though, it had an open-top 70's style Le Mans body.
Measuring the body was a pretty simple operation. We took the front clip (bodywork from the windscreen forward) and placed it on a table. The body was then adjusted to get it as close to level as possible. There are only a few spots on the body that are straight, let alone level. Next we took a square and placed it on the table behind the front clip and clamped a piece of angle onto it. That piece was then adjusted so that it was level and I started taking measurements.
The body was taped off using thin painters tape. First it was taped down the middle and every six inches untill the driver's side of the clip was reached. The same was done from back to front using six inch spaces. The measurements were taken wherever these lines crossed, and also wherever there were features in the body, such as the radiator duct, the headlight, and the intake bubble.
The measuring process took a few hours, all the while to the left of me the guys were swapping out the current 306ci motor that was run at Pocono in exchange for a 500 hp 289ci. The 289ci motor was the original size engine used in the daytona coupe. I'm going to go over again and get the detail of the front of the clip, which includes the inlet for the radiator, and some tighter curves. |
posted Jul 7, 2008 12:47 PM by Kyle Mason
Went to Pocono for an SCCA sanctioned event, and got to watch the Coupe run. It is a very quick car, and won its class. The set-up was a little off but this particular car was built for mainly road use.
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posted Jun 27, 2008 9:21 AM by Kyle Mason
| While I'm waiting to start dimensioning the car I thought I would share a link to the museum that currently has the original Daytona Coupe. The lucky museum is the Simeone Foundation Museum. It is located in Philadelphia and is host to a wide array of race cars, but most notably the csx2287. Here is a link to the site. Simeone Foundation Museum |
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