Tutorial series: Design for manufacturing
What you'll learn
Continue making a template that acts as a jig to hold a transfer punch for the lamp base plate. You’ll walk through projecting the base plate onto the surface of a block to trim and cut from a duplicate die and form the jig using tools like subtract and chamfer.
Transcript
00:01
So we don't need this top part anymore. I'm going to hide this. And we can focus on making a copy of this bottom part. I'm going to click the Copy button. And I'm just going to move this copy up a little bit. We're going to say 30 millimeters. And this other block here, we're going to keep as a die. We're not going to touch it. And we'll just turn it off. We're going to bring our base plate.
00:31
back. So clicking the base plate. And the next thing that we're going to do is sketch on the bottom face here. And so I'm just going to click the surface, click sketch, and I'm going to project a bunch of the curves from the base plate onto that surface. So I'm going to click this outer edge.
00:53
and I will click these holes as well because I want to preserve these for our template. And I'm also going to bring these bosses over as well. And if we look on our bottom surface, everything should be represented correctly.
01:15
There we go. And we can just click off the sketch and we can see that now we have a surface here. And what we're going to do is we're going to trim this block down and add the holes in that we need in order to make a template. I'm going to select all of these surfaces here. I'm going to leave the main body in place and I'm going to just extrude these through and cut the part that we have here. The duplicate.
01:44
bottom die and we're going to use that to make our template. So I'm going to extrude that up. The final step here of finishing up this template is to figure out a way to attach these two things securely. As the router is moving around the outside edge here, we don't want this plate to move. So this template here acts as a jig to hold, maybe a transfer punch to be able to locate these holes or to be able to put it on a drill press or clamp it down.
02:14
But then as the router's moving around, we really want to be able to connect this template to the plate itself. And the easiest way to do that would be to add a chamfer to these holes here that would allow us to put a flathead screw into this body and bolt through this plate just temporarily so that we can secure everything together. So I'm going to just make a five millimeter chamfer here.
02:40
And one of the things I want to do is to also bring that across all the other holes that are on this bottom plate. So I'm going to click on the chamfer history element here, and I'm going to click Select. And I'm also going to select these other edges, which are going to be included in the selection for that chamfer. So then I'm going to click Check. And there we go. Now we have chamfers on all of our holes. So you could pass a screw through this and get it into this bottom
03:11
Before we move on, we're going to do a little bit of cleanup. I'm just going to create a new folder. We're going to rename it Baseplate.
03:21
And we're going to add in all the components that we created. So we have our sketches, our planes, our multiple bodies here, which we can turn on just to take a look at them. And our base plate here is also on. So we're going to select those, we're going to click and drag them into our base plate folder. And then I'm going to move our base plate into our fabricated parts.
03:49
Again, now we have the ability to really quickly turn things on and off. So I'm going to turn off the base plate. I'm going to make sure that this sketch ends up in the right spot. Likewise, this plane also ends up over here. We're going to move on to our base cover.
Try it yourself
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About the instructor
Andrew Camardella is an Industrial Design Consultant and Faculty member at DePaul University, with a diverse background stemming from his passion for creation, tinkering, hacking, and experimentation. His expertise in the product development process and proficiency with various digital tools enable him to seamlessly translate concepts, 3D models, prototypes, and products between physical and digital realms, enabling clients to address user needs and tackle complex design and manufacturing challenges. His extensive design and fabrication experience spans multiple industries, including consumer and commercial products, large-scale art, digital imaging, packaging, environment design, green design, and instructional content development for a wide range of clients including tech startups, consumer goods companies, artists, and inventors.