Week 8 - Challenge 3 - Switch Bezel Design

OBJECTIVE:

Create the switch bezel plastic component through the given Class-A surface. To begin with, the tooling axis for the given class -A surface is created to meet the requirements of the draft angle and at the end perform Draft analysis on the model.

The thickness of the component is considered as 2.5 mm.

INTRODUCTION:

Draft:

• A Draft angle is a slant that is applied to each side of most features of an injection molded part. In other words, draft is providing Tapers on the product features such as walls, ribs, posts and bosses that lie parallel to the direction of the release from the mold part ejection.
• The nominal Draft is 3mm for plastic components and for automotive sheet metal components is 7mm.

Tooling axis:

• It is defined as the direction in which the mold opens or core and cavity, with the help of tooling axis created along X and Y axes are used for creating the main tooling axis by using bisecting method.

PROCEDURE:

Given Class-A surface:

The first and fore most thing to do is to check for the connectivity of the surfaces this is to ensure that there are no gaps between the surfaces if gaps are present then it should be resolved.

This can be done visually or by creating the boundaries. If their gaps are present, they are graphically represented by green lines. If not while performing boundary command it shows an error.

Draft Analysis for class-A surface:

Click the Insert>Analysis>Draft analysis icon

If material is not on there will be a warning massage is shown and then we need to select the material.

The Draft Analysis dialogue box is displayed. It gives information on the display, the draft direction and the direction values.

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:

Intersect the class A surface along the YZ plane and from the intersection, draw the lines and create a bisecting line using the drawn lines as shown below.

Now, by using XZ plane create a line with an angle of 6-Degree from the intersection line as shown in below picture.

By using the above two lines create a bisecting line which is the required tooling axis.

Class-B Surface Creation:

Class -B surface is created by extracting each wall and untrimmed walls, extrapolating the walls and then trimming the extra surfaces and offsetting it to certain value based upon the thickness of the component where it is 2.5mm. the off-set surface will be the B-Surface.

Class-C surface creation:

This surface is obtained by sweeping the boundaries of the Class-A surface along the tooling Axis direction, it connects A and B surfaces.

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 final trim we have the above shown surface with the Class-B surface using Trim feature.

The Final trim part is converted into a solid component using closed surface command.

PUBLICATIONS:

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

These are the main features that are published.

Draft analysis on the final component:

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

The following results were obtained.