Peli Eli Ghost Clip

Summary Continued- it’s the perfect way to add some spooky style to your workspace. Print this ghost clip in any color to brighten up your desk, classroom, or study area. It’s used as a fancy new way to clip papers together, using no outside parts. I collaborated with @Pauligee_2915685 on this project.

Objective- With a partner (or partners), you will recreate a ghost clip using Solidworks. You and your partner MUST have identical files and clips that you create by collaborating on each step, one at a time, using relations and other Solidworks skills you learned to make a replica of the original design.

First steps-

1. Click on “New” and then on “Part”,  then space and click on the front side of the cube. Make sure you are in sketch and not features. Navigate to the front plane.
2. Using the center point rectangle tool, create a constraint box 13 cm by 6cm centered around the origin. This box will contain all the features of the Ghost Clip. Also, make sure to have midpoint guidelines. Make all of the lines construction lines. You can do this by pressing “construction geometry” and then selecting each line you want to make into a construction line.
3. Make a horizontal construction line 0.8 cm lower than the top of the constraint box.
4. Now make 6 triangles, using the solid line tool, with their base on the bottom construction line and with their vertex on the top of the box. Space them out evenly. There should be 3 triangles on each side, with the last point of the 3rd one on the midpoint guideline created by the box.
5. Now make their sides equal using the equal relation (after selecting each side using ctrl then clicking on them) so each base should be 1cm and each other side should be 0.94 cm. 

The bottom-

1. For the bottom, make a horizontal construction line 1 cm above the bottom of the constraint box.
2. Now make 3 circles, each with a radius of 1 cm (or diameter of 2cm). They should be equally spaced, touching each other, and tangent to the horizontal construction line, as their diameter is 2 cm while the base is 6cm. 
3. Now select the Power Trim in the Trim Entities tool, and trim the top part of the circles so only the part beneath the construction line is left, leaving 3 equal semicircles.

The eyes-

1. For the eyes, make a horizontal construction line 2.9cm beneath the top of the constraint box.
2.  Now, spaced 1.7 cm from the left side, make a circle with a radius of 0.6cm or a diameter of 1.2cm. 
3. Now, using the Mirror Entities tool, select the circle and reflect it over the vertical construction line made by the midpoint guideline of the constraint box. 
4. Make sure the eyes are equally sized and both on the construction line we made before it, the same distance from the left and right of the sides of the box.

The Mouth-

1. Make a vertical construction 4 cm long, 5 cm below the top of the box, and 1.5 cm from the side.  It should reach around 9 cm below the top of the box.
2.  Now, use the Mirror Entities tool to mirror this line across the vertical midpoint guideline.
3. Next, we connect the 2 lines with a tangent arc (connect the bottom points of the line) . It should have a radius of 1.5 cm, and be a perfect semicircle. Now change every line made for the mouth into a construction line.
4. Finally, we use the Offset Entities command to circumscribe the construction lines by 0.3 cm. (Make sure to enable Cap Ends with Arcs and Bidirectional.
5. Make a vertical line going from the construction line 0.8 below the top of the box all the way to the construction line 1 cm above the bottom, and watch everything fill up!

Video- 

Peli Instructional Ghost Clip Video

Small issue- in the video, we said extrude the width to 0.0495, while it is 0.1cm. Sorry for the confusion! Also, in the procedure, we never extruded it, unlike the video.

Design Choices and Errors that occurred- Our original design was very similar to what we had in the end, but following our procedure we had a few issues or changes we wanted to make. 

When we created the circles on the bottom after we trimmed the top half, everything would go yellow and we didn't understand how it was over defined. What we did to solve this problem was go back to before we smart dimensioned the radius or diameter of the circle, first trim the top half when it wasn’t fully defined, then, after that, give it the dimension of the radius being 1 to get rid of the problem. We realized that we didn’t even need the 1 cm radius dimension or the height of the circle dimension. This error happened in the video as well, and I showed how to fix it.

As you can see in the picture below, all works well in the design after we deleted all of the circle smart dimensions-

Next, we had an issue we observed when we fine tuned the clip to compare it to the original design, and realized that we made the side of the mouth too long. We decreased it by 0.5 cm and then when we compared the 2 again they looked identical. This was a purely aesthetic change, it wouldn't have changed anything about its functionality.

Comparing the original ghost we attempted to redesign and our Solidworks design-

Here's our before and after in Solidworks-

Conclusion-

Me and Paul did very well in this project, with only 2 minor differences with the original. The first one is visible in the picture of me comparing the original ghost clip to our Solidworks design, as you can tell the eyes are a little bit too low on our design; we should have removed 0.1cm from the dimension of the center of the circles and the top of the box. Also, our triangles are a little bit too short, but that was such a small difference if you didn't really try to find differences between ours and the original you would have never found it. We could fix this by making the guideline for the base of the triangles 0.9cm below the top instead of 0.8.

Here's a before and after of everything we would have changed-