Desk Rodents!

prusaprinters

Lesson Plan and ActivityThe goal of this lesson was to create a set of 4 office supply organisers with one unified design style, while still being functional. All items needed to use fillets, and maybe chamfers, and - amongst the set - the products needed to be made full-scale in Solidworks, and needed to use extrudes, revolves, sweeps, and lofts. They also needed to make use of 1 of the following: circular pattern, linear pattern, sketch-driven pattern, or mirror. They also needed to fit in a 10cm3 cube, and used limited or no supports. Assembly/Construction:(See attached PDFs) Also, the squirrel requires a tape dispenser’s blade and roll holder, as well as either super glue, hot glue or epoxy to attach the blade. Design ChoicesWe initially planned a couple, but settled on a theme of 4 rodent organisers:A rat cup,A squirrel tape dispenser,A hamster pencil-holder,And a mouse paperclip.(The mouse got sacked because we didn’t have time to do it and it wasn’t very fleshed out.) Let’s go over the development of the first one.Initially, the order of the steps called for the spiral to be made (and with it the dome) after the cup itself.However, the problem with this was that the cup’s rim intersected the end of the helix sweep.if the tip of the tail were to be domed (as was the intent) this would interfere with the end  surface. It wouldn’t be round!This was remedied (after stripping half the part and doing a bunch of stuff again from scratch) by reordering the steps so that the end face was domed first. Only then could the cup’s revolve be added. Also, in the original sketch, it layed out how the face should be constructed. Originally, the eyes and ears were perfectly horizontally symmetrical, and the flat edge of the semicircle that the ear revolved from was a vertical line.Both were changed, let’s cover the ear first.As you can see, in order to actually dimension the ear relative to the origin, an angled structure had to be added to set its position. As the semicircle came off of this structure, its diameter line was also angled.As for the mirror, the features of the face (the ears, eye, and fillet inside the eye that was added to reduce risk of print failure) couldn’t be mirrored directly across the midplane, because there was stuff there.← (Helpful fillet!)Instead, using a sketch to set the angle, an angled plane was made to act as the plane for the mirror, tilting the rat’s lil face to the side.