Solid Works Skill Builder

For the spring semester of my freshman year at Northeastern University, I was tasked with an individual Solid Works during my cornerstone 2 course. For this skill builder, I was required to plan, hand sketch, assemble, and professionally digitally use solid works to sketch a themed chess set.

My chess set theme was tools. The first step to this process was sketching each of my chess pieces and deciding which actual chess piece they correlate to (for example, the screw is the king) and drawing how they would look like on the set. Figure 1 below showcases my initial idea that was hand sketched.

The planned height for each piece is as follows:

- Screw, 35 mm

- Bolt, 50 mm

- Flashlight, 55 mm

- Hammer, 60 mm

- Wrench, 65 mm

- Screwdriver, 75 mm

The above text and dimensions display my efforts in planning each piece accordingly before beginning my journey in Solid Works. This marks the planning and ideation stage of my design process, as I went back and forth this stage many times before finalizing the dimensions and sketches.

The Solid Works aspect of this project was the most complex for me as I had to learn so many skills and techniques to complete each piece. Below is a list of each tool I used for each piece:

- Screw (Pawn): Revolve base and Trim entities

- Bolt (Rook): Extruded boss, material selection, drafting, Chamfer and thread.

- Flashlight (Knight): Fillet, Revolved Boss/Base, ‘shell’ and spline feature.

- Hammer (Bishop): Cut extrude and Revolved base.

- Wrench (Queen): Offset entities, extruded boss and fillet.

- Screwdriver (King): Revolved boss/base, Mirror entities, Drafting, and extruding.

Below is a series of images displaying 2 views of my final chess set:

Another important skill I learned throughout my journey in Solid Works was making an assembly drawing and a parts drawing for a model. This taught me how to professionally display an engineers design to a viewer, providing them with necessary details about the design such as quantity of pieces, different points of views of the chess set and each piece, and more.

Below are images of both the assembly and parts drawing:

This skill builder marked a pivotal moment in my engineering student journey as it taught me how to use the skills learned in a classroom setting for a real individual hands on project that combines professional skills and creativity. I was able to learn how to creatively display my ideas through careful planning and modelling on solid works as well as exploring new techniques on the software, and finally professionally displaying my work through part and assembly drawings.

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