Revolve, Subtract, and Mirror

00:00

In this video we're going to recreate this gas tank on the motorcycle in Shapr3D. Every face on this gas tank is curved and the gas tank is also symmetrical. The way we're going to approach this is first to cut our work in half by just modeling half of the tank and then mirroring it. And also we're going to start with a block and cut it away with revolved features to create the curvature. So let's get started.

00:29

We'll open a new sketch on the side plane, and we want to create a rectangle here.

00:39

Let's create a construction line that goes from the origin to the far side and turn this into a construction line.

00:53

and we'll drag this off the origin, put it back and lock it in place. Now we can put a dimension between the construction line and the end of the gas tank, which we'll say is 6 inches, and we'll give an overall dimension of 15. The height.

01:16

We'll just say is 12. We're making this a little larger than we need to because we're going to cut away material. Now we'll exit the sketch using your orientation cube, a hot key or your space mouse. Get into an isometric view and pull this out. Let's say 10 inches. From the top view, we have a pretty good idea of the shape that we want. So let's start a sketch on the top plane.

01:45

And we'll start with a straight line for the air scoop in the front and then add an arc. We'll use A to switch.

01:58

And I'll run this off of the part. Because these are all solid features, we need to enclose the sketch. So let's go ahead and do that. These enclosing lines don't have to be straight or pretty or exact, but the lines and arcs that create geometry do need to be controlled.

02:23

Now I'm going to add in a center line to Revolve, and we'll put it out here. I want this to go straight across, and I'll turn it into a construction line and add a dimension between here and here. This will allow me to control this distance precisely. Now I can exit the sketch and create a Revolve.

02:53

Here you need to be careful because in selecting this area, you'll need to select both the inside and the outside. Both regions need to be selected. And then also select the axis that you want to revolve the shape around. Now we don't need this necessarily to go 360 degrees, so we can use the

03:22

area out here and we'll need to expand our sketch to encompass that in the cut. So let's go back to this second sketch. We just grab this line and pull it out appropriately. From here we can use the subtract tool to remove from this body and this is the body we want to subtract.

03:51

that's established clearly with the pluses and minuses. So we'll say done.

03:59

And that's good.

04:03

Now we want to cut from the side.

04:08

So let's go through this process again. We'll open a sketch on this plane using an arc that goes.

04:17

all the way across and we'll put lines in to enclose the shape.

04:29

and then also a line for a center axis for the cut. Control 1 for an isometric view. From here we'll add the revolve using the V hotkey. Click the outside of the shape and shift click inside the shape and then also click on the axis. We don't need 360 degrees. We only need this much.

04:54

click to say done. So we go to tools, subtract, subtract from the main body and we want to use the revolve to subtract. We'll say okay. So now we've got two parts of the tank completed. You can actually do some editing from here and I think I'm going to do that.

05:15

pull this end point down and it's nice how Shapr3D is editing this dynamically. So we can get a feeling for how this is going to work out in the end. This concludes part one of the gas tank. Come back for part two.