Butterfly telescoping Fidget

Problem Statement:

Work with a partner to create a telescoping fidget device made through the utilization of sketch offsets and drafted extrusion/cuts. As accountabilibuddies, you and your partner will be able to work together to provide each other with feedback and solve any problems. Having similar designs is not expected by the two of you, although it could help in speeding up the process. 

*my partners printables report can be found here: @Samantha_Hum_2508051*

Constraints 

• The sketch must begin with a constraint box, (center rectangle created from the origin)
• your outermost outline must fit within a 8cm x 8cm box or equivalent area (64cm^2)
• dimensions/relations should be efficient.
• It is not required to fully define your sketch, but it will help
• The sketch must contain zero error messages
• Demonstrate efficient use of “Offset Entities

I picked this design because butterflies represent lightness and joy, much like the concept of this telescoping fidget. Butterflies are also very beautiful and creating a butterfly fidget seemed pretty easy. When making a design similar to this butterfly telescoping fidget, the following steps may be helpful in allowing for an easier designing process. 

Part One:

• Create a 7cm x 9cm construction box and Extrude the construction box. (doesn’t matter the height)

• Click on the extruded box and select appearances and then face. 
• Then hit advanced and browse (select all image files) to find your source image.

• Save the image to downloads and then go to mapping and select projection. 
• Adjust your source image to fit your box and hit the green check mark when finished. 

Part Two:

Trace your image (make sure it is being done on the sketch plane and not on top of the extruded box).

• Delete the box extrusion
• Start offsetting your image 0.1 cm inwards 
• continue doing this until you reach the center of your design
• try to keep the number of offsets even

Part Three:

• Click on the very first offset and boss extrude it (the first one should be set to blind in the direction box) 
  • Set height to 1.00 cm
  • Set degree to 25 cm
• Then cut extrude the second offset 
  • Change the direction, set it to be through all
  • Set degree to 15 cm
• Going forward all boss extrudes should be up to surface in the direction box
  • Repeat the extrusion step for the rest of the offsets

Part Four:

• After the extrusions are finished mirror the design 
  • From the feature tree, select mirror
  • Change menu option to “bodies”
  • Choose all rings 
  • Select merge solids 
  • Hit the green check mark
• Choose color and save as 3mf

Design changes

Problem #1

While making our design the very first aspect we had to change was our design itself. Initially we traced over the design using 3 point arcs and set tangent relations between all the arcs for smoother curves. 

Initial design:

Given the many tangent relations and 3 point arcs, extruding the design didn’t work for the 25 degrees measure and the numbers the design was comfortable with were very small and wouldn’t work for the succession of this project. It is also visible that the offsets weren’t as curvy as they moved inwards. Therefore we started a new design and created our 7cm x 9cm constraint box. Then we thought of using the ellipses tool to create a new butterfly.

This design could have worked but it didn’t really look as pretty as we wanted it to so we found a simpler image to trace. To use the new source image we got rid of the newly made butterfly, extruded the box and added the source image on top. 

Though we didn't use the butterfly design made by the ellipses, we still used the ellipses tool when tracing the new source image. After the ellipses were created, we utilized trim entities to get rid of the lines in between. We then followed that up but adding sketch fillets (to get a nicer curve) in between the top and bottom wings (added on the left and right side). After all of this was completed we started offsetting.

sketch fillets:

.                          

                           (the same sketch fillet was added on the other side too)

Final sketch:

Problem #2

The next problem we faced was the offsets. We were only able to offset the sketch once before encountering any issues. The problem we faced with the offsets was that, after the first offset we weren't able to offset the sketch inwards anymore. For some reason the offset feature would only work if the direction was outwards. 

A lot of different things were tried in order to fix this problem. We tried getting rid of the sketch fillets and changing some of the arcs on the design. However, it became impossible to offset the sketch inwards. Therefore we got rid of the first offset and scaled the design down to be about 1.5 cm x 2 cm. From here we started offsetting outwards and completed the remaining steps to complete our design!

Finally we had a finished design that was ready for printing.