SDC1 drawn by Kyle Mason

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More CAD Work

posted ‎‎Aug 21, 2008 7:03 AM‎‎ by Kyle Mason
    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