Golf club head. Trying to keep continuous curvature, is Solidworks enough?

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

Download VX 11 and see for yourself how much better VX 11 is than SaladWorks when it comes to curvature continuous.

jon

Just a caution - you probably shouldn't show your design publicly otherwise you won't be able to protect your intellectual property rights.

Im more interested in learning how to do this than creating a product. I am really only doing this to build some sort of portfolio anyway. Thought showing it might be help someone to point out where I'm going wrong with the surfacing techniques.

ok sorry just checking, I read from your first post you were going to make this part with a mind to production later... as a help starter have you seen Ed Eaton's ppt tutorials?

Nice lookin models. It should be very easy to create curvature continuous surfaces for these, there are some rules though.

It's pretty easy to create conditions that don't work. Generally speaking, CC surfs "don't" work when one of the boundaries is composed of elements (or intersections) that aren't CC. There are probably some basic mathematical reasons for this, makes sense to me anyway. Analytic to CC seems to work OK.

Mark

I'd say you're doing really well for someone who isn't that familiar with CAD or SolidWorks. Extremely well!

The two tools that seem to help me most as far as how things are going to look are zebra stripes on the faces and curvature combs on the splines. But I'm an engineer, not an artist.

Curvature continuous lofts and fillets are relatively new in SolidWorks. The user interface isn't the greatest and they're not very robust. It could be that the tools just aren't up to it, but since they failed every time you tried, I suspect that you are doing something to make it harder than normal. You might want to try some very simple test cases, starting with analytic base geometry to see if you can figure out where the problem lies. Mark's advice seems reasonable and you should definitely follow Neil's suggestion and get Ed Eaton's Curvy Stuff tutorials.

Pro/E has been doing this kind of work longer and has a better reputation for capability. The "old" user interface sucked big time and I wouldn't want to jump into it without training. The "new" (Wildfire) interface is very much like SolidWorks, so you might be able to get up to speed pretty quickly. Some of the more esoteric functionality, like curvature continuous surfacing, may still use the old interface, though.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

Give Rhino a try.

Mike S

I got the model where I want it but I am getting some serious flexibility issues. Everytime I make a slight edit to a sketch, like changing the loft of the club by as little as 1 degree, I have to go in and fix all the lofts. Guide curves get switched to profiles, profiles to guide curves, and totally unrelated curves get thrown in there too.

I was planning on doing some FEM on this model and if I have to go through and reset all the surface features for every iteration of each of the 8 different irons, what a pain. Is there some way to get it to keep these this stuff strait?

Something pathological is going on with your model. Lofts, sweeps and fills are twitchy, so seemingly minor modifications can often cause them to fail or behave strangely, but they usually don't change guide curves and profiles around. I've seen them lose guide curves or profiles, so that they have to be selected again, but I haven't seen them switched.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

"Something pathological is going on with your model" I'll ditto what Jerry wrote. I have never seen guides and profiles flip - the closest I have seen is last week when they appeared in the wrong order under the loft in the Feature Manager, but that is pretty trivial. It would help if we knew what version of Swx and what service pack you are running. These things are very sensitive to version.

One other thought - by any chance did you use contour selection or smart selection? I have had some bad experiences with both and simply do not trust them.

BTW - Your model may not be a suitable candidate for configurations anyway if you need to manipulate loft connectors to get the loft to behave. In SWx 2005 (at least up to sp3.1) I am seeing the connectors resetting every time I make a change to profiles or sometimes guides. As you cycle through your configs you will have to redo the connector edits.

I just did a series of five family parts that would have been a nice job for configurations were it not for this. So instead I made one, got it right (we even built and tested it) then saved it as 4 new parts to make the other 4 versions. It's sort of a drag but saved time over the long run.

-Ed

I am using 2005, don't know which service pack. I'll have to check next time I am in the lab.

I simplified simplified the features and I have gotten it so that it just loses one profile in one loft, the same one, everytime I rebuild. I was really afraid I might not be able to use configurations, hopefully I can find a way to work it.