Baseball Cup (Paperclip Holder)

My partner Josy and I created four office supplies with a sports theme. This baseball can be used as a cup to hold anything on your desk, but it was designed specifically to hold paper clips. There are two parts that you need to print (no supports required), and they fit together perfectly in a very satisfying way. We have three other designs inspired by sports go check out my page for a football and go check out Josy's page (Will put the tag in when created) for a golf ball and a soccer ball. 

We created these objects for my engineering class and here are the problem statement and constraints.

Problem Statement:

A recent analysis by Staples's finance department has concluded that sales for desktop organization products have declined in recent years.  The company would like to ramp up their profits in this area by enhancing the aesthetic nature of these products.  

Your group of two has been hired to design a set of theme-based organizational products.  Your team will design a set of office supplies that are tied together with a common theme. You must be able to justify the theme that connects the products.  The idea is that the customer will not want to buy just one; they will want to buy the whole set.

Constraints:

• You will be constructing an actual size model of your product in Solidworks.
• Your items must be interesting to look at and unique - a conversation starter.  An individual walking by would do a double take to closely examine the amazingly artistic item you’ve created.
• Your items must contain examples of ALL FOUR main Features:  Extrusion, Revolve, Sweep, and Loft. 
  • All Features DO NOT need to be present in each piece, just amongst the set
• Your items must take advantage of at least one of: Circular Pattern, Linear Pattern, Sketch-Driven Pattern, Mirror 
  • All Features DO NOT  need to be present in each piece, just amongst the set
• All of your items must take advantage of Filleting and maybe Chamfering
• Each piece you design should fit within a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm cube, or 1000cm3 volume equivalent.
  • Each item can be multiple pieces to be assembled for easier printing
  • Maximum length in any direction is limited to 20cm (slightly negotiable, MAYBE 27cm max)
• Should be 3D printable with limited/no supports, (each item can be multiple assemblable pieces to help this)

How it was made:

For this baseball, the main baseball was created by following this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw_NqJ_yFUM&t=864s and then I created the base by just creating a plane with relations touching the bottom of the ball and the top plane. I sketched a circle on the plane to be 6cm, extruded it 1 cm up and drafted in by 30 degrees. I then cut the ball in half using a cut extrude at 0.0001 cm on the top plane. I then created another circle on the top plane that was 5.4 cm so that it was inside the baseball. Finally, to make the cup a cup and not a ball, I made another plane with relations 1 cm above the top plane and to the top plane. Then cut extruded up through all to make what you see now.

Design Choices:

1st change

Before

After

This first design choice happened because, as you can see in picture one, the sweep did not work. I don't know why this happened, and I tried numerous times to get the sweep to connect fully. So since I got lucky here and the space between them was so small, all I needed to do was select the face where it stopped and just Boss Base extrude it up to the surface, and then the problem was fixed.

2nd change

Before

After

Another design choice change made was the base. At first, I was going to just create a simple base that was a 4cm circle that just went straight up but that did not look too snazzy and it made the inside of the base ball weird. So to fix the problem I made the circle base 6 cm and then drafted it inward by a degree of 30 and then made it go up to 1c that turned out to work really well and it just gave the baseball that extra snazzy.
 

Thanks for reading!