Golf club head. Trying to keep continuous curvature, is Solidworks enough?

I have been attempting to get a useable model of a golf iron head from
Solidworks for about a week now and it has been insanely harder than I
expected. I am not all that familiar with Solidworks or CAD in
general, I am more used to software geared more towards art like 3d
Studio Max.

My real problem I need help with has been in keeping the curvature
somewhat continuous. I keep reading about the importance of this for
asthetic products but apparently Solidworks has trouble doing this. It
looks decent in the Solidworks viewport but I don't know how good the
actual casting will come out. The continuous curvature lofts and
fillets have failed in every situation i have tried to use them on this
model. Is there something simple that I am missing, or is this just
not the job for Solidworks? I have access to ProEngineer as well but
no idea how to use it. I am not doing this commercially, yet at least,
but I am looking to actually manufacture this part.

This is what the model looks like so far. Some parts are still
relatively sloppy. Any tips or discouragement from this program?

http://kwalker.ms11.net/iron2.jpg
http://kwalker.ms11.net/curve.jpg

 

wrote in

Download VX 11 and see for yourself how much better VX 11 is than
SaladWorks when it comes to curvature continuous.

http://www.vx.com/freeeval.cfm

jon

 

Just a caution - you probably shouldn't show your design publicly otherwise
you won't be able to protect your intellectual property rights.

 

Im more interested in learning how to do this than creating a product.
I am really only doing this to build some sort of portfolio anyway.
Thought showing it might be help someone to point out where I'm going
wrong with the surfacing techniques.

 

ok sorry just checking,
I read from your first post you were going to make this part with a mind to
production later... as a help starter have you seen Ed Eaton's ppt
tutorials? http://www.dimontegroup.com/Tutorials.htm

 

<snicker>
Poor jb's totally clueless again.

 

Nice lookin models. It should be very easy to create curvature continuous
surfaces for these, there are some rules though.

It's pretty easy to create conditions that don't work. Generally speaking,
CC surfs "don't" work when one of the boundaries is composed of elements (or
intersections) that aren't CC. There are probably some basic mathematical
reasons for this, makes sense to me anyway. Analytic to CC seems to work OK.

Mark

 

I'd say you're doing really well for someone who isn't that familiar with
CAD or SolidWorks. Extremely well!

The two tools that seem to help me most as far as how things are going to
look are zebra stripes on the faces and curvature combs on the splines. But
I'm an engineer, not an artist.

Curvature continuous lofts and fillets are relatively new in SolidWorks. The
user interface isn't the greatest and they're not very robust. It could be
that the tools just aren't up to it, but since they failed every time you
tried, I suspect that you are doing something to make it harder than normal.
You might want to try some very simple test cases, starting with analytic
base geometry to see if you can figure out where the problem lies. Mark's
advice seems reasonable and you should definitely follow Neil's suggestion
and get Ed Eaton's Curvy Stuff tutorials.

Pro/E has been doing this kind of work longer and has a better reputation
for capability. The "old" user interface sucked big time and I wouldn't want
to jump into it without training. The "new" (Wildfire) interface is very
much like SolidWorks, so you might be able to get up to speed pretty
quickly. Some of the more esoteric functionality, like curvature continuous
surfacing, may still use the old interface, though.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

Give Rhino a try.

Mike S

 

Looks nice to me, BTW.
Not that I'd know what might be wrong, if anything?

Far, far better than anything poor jb ever
saw in a demo I expect, anyway.

 

I got the model where I want it but I am getting some serious
flexibility issues. Everytime I make a slight edit to a sketch, like
changing the loft of the club by as little as 1 degree, I have to go in
and fix all the lofts. Guide curves get switched to profiles, profiles
to guide curves, and totally unrelated curves get thrown in there too.

I was planning on doing some FEM on this model and if I have to go
through and reset all the surface features for every iteration of each
of the 8 different irons, what a pain. Is there some way to get it to
keep these this stuff strait?

 

Something pathological is going on with your model. Lofts, sweeps and fills
are twitchy, so seemingly minor modifications can often cause them to fail
or behave strangely, but they usually don't change guide curves and profiles
around. I've seen them lose guide curves or profiles, so that they have to
be selected again, but I haven't seen them switched.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

"Something pathological is going on with your model"
I'll ditto what Jerry wrote. I have never seen guides and profiles
flip - the closest I have seen is last week when they appeared in the
wrong order under the loft in the Feature Manager, but that is pretty
trivial.
It would help if we knew what version of Swx and what service pack you
are running. These things are very sensitive to version.

One other thought - by any chance did you use contour selection or
smart selection? I have had some bad experiences with both and simply
do not trust them.

BTW - Your model may not be a suitable candidate for configurations
anyway if you need to manipulate loft connectors to get the loft to
behave. In SWx 2005 (at least up to sp3.1) I am seeing the connectors
resetting every time I make a change to profiles or sometimes guides.
As you cycle through your configs you will have to redo the connector
edits.

I just did a series of five family parts that would have been a nice
job for configurations were it not for this. So instead I made one,
got it right (we even built and tested it) then saved it as 4 new parts
to make the other 4 versions. It's sort of a drag but saved time
over the long run.

-Ed

 

I am using 2005, don't know which service pack. I'll have to check
next time I am in the lab.

I simplified simplified the features and I have gotten it so that it
just loses one profile in one loft, the same one, everytime I rebuild.
I was really afraid I might not be able to use configurations,
hopefully I can find a way to work it.