Ghost Clip

Summary : 

Are you tired of boring office equipment? Are you looking to incorporate a whimsical aspect into your professional routine? Well, the 13cm x 6cm x 0.15cm clip, with a face resembling a ghost, is perfect for the upcoming spooky season! The ghost clips maintain the same operational features as a normal paperclip, temporarily binding papers together. For this project, I worked with Casey McKenna.

Problem Statement : 

With a partner, you will recreate your ghost clip using Solidworks.  You and your partner MUST have identical files that you create by collaborating on each step, one at a time.

Assembly/Construction Instructions : 

PREP

• Draw a constraint box with a 13cm x 6cm center rectangle, centered on the origin.
• To make sure that all lines are dotted, hold Command A to uncheck construction and recheck construction.

TRIANGLES

• Separate the width of 6cm into 3 dotted line segments using lines for construction 1cm above the bottom of the constraint box.
• Hold down on shift and manually add the equal relation for the three line segments.
• Draw a 1cm dotted line starting at the center of the 3 dotted line segments, moving down.
• Draw solid lines to form 2 sides of the triangle using the aforementioned dotted lines as guides.
• Repeat 2 more times!

CURVES

• Separate the width of 6cm into 4 dotted line segments using lines for construction 0.5cm below the top of the constraint box.
• Hold down on shift and manually add the equal relation for the four line segments.
• Draw a 0.5cm dotted line starting at the center of the 4 dotted line segments, moving up.
• Draw a 3 point arc to create a semicircle, making points at the endpoints of the 4 dotted line segments and at the top of the 0.5 dotted line.
• Repeat 3 more times!

EYES 

• Draw a 1.5cm construction vertical line from the rightmost endpoint of the first semicircle. For the opposite side, start it from the leftmost endpoint of the last semicircle.
• Hold down on shift and manually add the equal relation for both aforementioned vertical lines.
• Make a circle using a point from anywhere on the plane extended to the point from the bottom of the vertical line.
• Use smart dimensions to set the diameter to 1.2cm to resize the circle appropriately.
• Draw a 1cm construction horizontal line from the side of the constraint box to the edge of the circle.
• Repeat for the opposite side!

SMILEY

• Draw a 2.6cm slanted line located 0.8cm above the 3 horizontal dotted segments from the triangle.
• Draw a 4.5cm vertical line that connects to the slanted one.
• Distance the outer edge of the constraint box to the 4.5cm vertical line as 1.2cm.
• Select the mirror command and mirror it around the dotted line that splits the drawing in half, previously formed from the constraint box’s rectangle.
• Use the offset tool and extend the lines to 0.5cm. 
• Check the option to cap the ends with arcs.

Design Choices :

First, Casey and I made a sketch of a ghost clip on centimeter graph paper. We used a ruler to measure the physical ghost clip and then we transferred that information to our paper in a one to one ratio. However, while using SolidWorks, we made a couple corrections so subsequently, our final ghost clip features a couple of new changes.

In our initial drawing, we wrote down nine different lengths for the smiley! We measured the lengths of each line segment from the outer smiley, the lengths of each line segment from the inner smiley, the lengths in between the inner lines, and the lengths in between the constraint box. But, instead of replicating all of those measurements on SolidWorks, which would have resulted in an overdimensioned feature, we used the mirror tool and then the offset tool. With mirror, we only had to label three measurements of half the smiley because when we transformed it across the y axis, the measurements would be retained. For offset, we set the fourth measurement as 0.5 for the distance between the lines. We made these changes so our finished SolidWorks sketch would become a lot less crowded than our previous paper but also so it wouldn't send us an error message if we inputed too much so this was both an aesthetic change and a functional one.

Contrasting that change, our next one was about underdimensioning the semicircles on top of the ghost clip. On the paper, we only wrote down two measurements for the semicircles so when we put that into SolidWorks, they wouldn’t lock down. Our semicircles remained blue because we didn’t give the program a location for their x axis or their y axis. With the intention of making them black, we anchored them down to the edge of the eyes, which gave them a position for the y axis. For the x axis, we held down on shift to make the semicircles horizontal to each other with a manual relation, creating a functional change that kept our ghost clip fully locked down.

Perhaps the most obvious contrasts between our tangible sketch and our virtual one are the numerical values. On our paper, we recorded the lengths of the ghost clip that we were currently using. Since we didn’t keep those original ghosts, we went to the cardboard box to pick out a new one. But, when we measured those lengths and compared it to the ones we had logged on SolidWorks, they were not identical. We went into a little bit of a frenzy to measure and remeasure but we ultimately decided that our ghost was not going to be identical to every other ghost. Because of printing shrinkage, the measurements can sometimes differ so we picked a couple and averaged their measurements for our final. This was definitely a crucial improvement in order to follow the challenge of creating identical ghosts. The images below show our full initial sketch on paper and our full final sketch on SolidWorks!