For this week’s assignment, we were tasked with modeling our midterm projects in IronCAD with geometric accuracy.

We learned the following in class:

1. How to make positive objects via dragging from the menu

2. How to make negative spaces via menu dragging

3. How to scale dimensions of these objects

4. How to move & drag these elements in space via F10 (aka triball)

5. How to get the best rendering angle and view

6. How to generate renderings and export via JPEG

With these skills involved, I was able to effectively create a geometric representation of the Flywheel and Governor midterm project. Below is the first rendering of the complete mechanism:

Next, in order to illustrate and show the different parts and possibly unseen structures, I provided an exploded view of the piece shown below:

The hardest part of this project was moving and scaling all of the pieces within IronCAD to fit together. IronCAD does not have a very intuitive moving feature, so it took a lot of trial and error before I was able to properly fit the pieces together to make the complete mechanism’s rendering. Below is a picture of the actual piece vs. the IronCAD rendering in the background for comparison:

Ultimately, I think that it’s really cool how you can synthesize volumes and mechanisms purely digitally. The implication for this is when we transform bits into atoms – AKA 3-D printing, which opens a lot of doors in terms of designing objects and forms for use in devices. I’m pretty excited to apply this computer-aided-drawing toward creating objects via printer because it’ll allow for designs that could have never been made by conventional manufacturing methods like molding or cutting.