Week 8 - Challenge 2 - Base Bracket Design

AIM: To create a base bracket plastic component through a given Class A surface and perform draft analysis on the final plastic component.

INTRODUCTION: In this project we are designing a base bracket using given class A surface. The approach includes creation of class B surface keeping 3mm thickness in mind for the complete component. The design also included Class creation from the given parent surface.

CLASS A SURFACE: The following surface is given as the input for the component creation.

• To continue with the design process first we need to find out the tooling axis for the surface and check for all the drafts using Draft Analysis tool of CATIA.

Draft analysis for surface A:

The analysis is done for 3 Degree draft. So as can be seen all the surfaces are more than 3 degrees.

Creation of tooling axis:

• Create an intersection of CLASS A surface with ZX plane and from the intersection create the tooling axis as shown below.

• Create a bisecting line using the lines shown above.

• Here, line shown in dotted yellow is our tooling axis.

Creation of Class B Surface:

• Now, for class B creation, we have extracted surface from class A and untrimmed them to obtain the original parent surface.
• These surfaces are then offset to the required thickness.
• After offsetting, all the surfaces are trimmed into a required shape.
• Required fillets are given to the surfaces.

Creation of Class C:

• For creating this surface, we have extended the boundary of the Class A using multi-extract and then converted to smooth curve.
• Now this smooth curve is swept along the draft direction with a 3-degree draft.

Final trims:

Class A + Class C:

• To make sure that there is not any open boundary between Class A and Class c, we have used join option to create a single body. This is done to make sure that the parting line doesn’t lie between these two surfaces.

Class A + Class B + Class C:

For this we have trimmed the above shown surface with the Class B surface using Trim feature.

Publications:

• Tooling axis
• Class A Surface
• Class B Surface
• Class C Surface

These are the main features are published.

Draft analysis on the final component:

For this analysis, main tooling axis is taken the draft reference.

The following results were obtained.