SDC1 drawn by Kyle Mason
 
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Four Months Later...

posted ‎‎Dec 14, 2008 7:38 PM‎‎ by Kyle Mason   [ updated ‎‎Dec 14, 2008 8:14 PM‎‎ ]
    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.