Assistance in design

[Rick Mullin]

Thank you for the input.

I have sent emails to several companies. The only one that responded so far was focusauto. They felt that they were not set up to deal with this type of project and that the transferring and scaling images was a very involved process. I can see how a company may shy away from this type of small project that could end up being very labor intensive.

Their suggestion was to do it the old fashion way which I am very capable and knowledged with. I was just hoping for a quicker solution. I am not at all a computer guy (I have not come very far from using a slide rule in college). I have a tendency to over simplify these things thinking that a computer should readily be able to handle such a project.

Any more thoughts are appreciated.

Rick

[anders nørgaard]

Rick,

Any chance you'll tell us WHICH car you're gong to build? Maybe someone drew it already!

http://www.the-blueprints.com/blueprints/cars/

[Rick Mullin]

I am sorry to say that at this point, I do not permission from the customer to discuss the car itself. I am sure that it will not be any great secret but I must have his permission. The project is still in the early stages of discovery.
Rick

[James(Western Canada)]

Rick: focusauto is the one that immediately came to mind, and was mentioned here on MM previously.......and I was surprized to hear of at the time, being as they are only three hours away in Calgary.

http://www.focusauto.com/

Could you not have someone local do the cad work (scaling, outlines, etc) and then turn that info over to focus for cutting the bucks ??

PS: You have (or will shortly) a PM on a related topic....

James

[luscten]

Have you tried to find 3 view drawings that are already drawn? This site has a lot of 3 views. The-blueprints.com.

Randy Tait

[928'34Ford]

http://www.3dengineers.co.uk/

Used to post as Whitney Paine. UK based obviously.

[Michael Moore]

Rick, I suspect that you'll find creating a 3D model of a complicated shape like a car will be a major and expensive task requiring a pretty skilled modeler. Organic shapes are complicated things to do. You'd probably model one half of the car and then mirror to get the other symmetric half, and then still need to do a lot of cleanup to blend things down the middle. One of Tim Barton's books has a chapter on the process.

What might work for you would be to create a small-scale model of the car and then have it scanned/CMM'd to create the digital model. Could you find a plastic model of some other race car of a similar vintage and shape and then attack it with bondo so you don't have to start from scratch?

I did a quick Google on 3D service houses in PA and came up with

http://sldtech.com/

in Blue Bell PA. There's probably other 3D service shops in your area that you could talk to to find out about getting a physical model digitized. And they should all be able to do the modeling as well.

cheers,
Michael

[egad]

Hi Richard-

If your data is in the form of photographs, the best way to go about reverse engineering it is to use a photogrammetry method. I personally use the software made by Photomodeler:

http://www.photomodeler.com/

After extracting as many critical points I can pick up in the photograpahs, I then bring the data into my CAD system to build surfaces or solid models. Even with good quality photographs taken from alot of angles with fiducial targets in the scene, it's still a very time consuming process to work this way. Your best bet will most likely be to use the photography data to get critcal measurements, and then couple it with some amount of artistic representation on the CAD side.

[Rick Mullin]

Thank you. The overall opinion is that there is a lot of artistic work required to add to the CAD. It could perhaps be very time consuming on the computer (expensive). I probably will just do it the old fashion way with paper and pencil. The poject is not due to come in until the winter so I have some time to think about it.
Rick