Heywood Wheel... picking your own nits!

[dandy97]

The reason behind the appearance of facets on that surface alone, is because that curve was generated in Autocad on another computer, then imported into my 3D application. All the other curves on the part were created by my 3D software and have no evidence of faceting.

Well this explains what was mystifying and bothering me about the part. Because of the lack of faceting on the other radii of the part, I would not have expected to "see" any on any of the radii, no matter how light.

Being a new guy here, I should probably throw out a little of my background. This most likely isn't the correct place for that but what the hell. Among other departments, I run engineering at a prototyping company. We manufacture prototypes in a multitude of ways and one of them is with rapid prototyping machines. We have 6 RP machines, 4 SLS (selective laser sintering) 1 direct metal sintering (metal rapid prototype parts) and 1 FDM (fused deposition modeling or 3D printing). We use Magics and Materialize along with SolidView every day to set up our builds. I have many thousands of hours on a half a dozen different CAD systems including: Solidworks, Pro-E, UG, AutoCAD, etc. One of the perks is I can use the stuff to make whatever I want, a modelers dream right? The bad part is between working 60-65 hours a week, spending time with the family and the honey do list, I have no time to model. I restarted my modeling hobby about a year and a half ago from a two decade slumber. I do have a couple of projects on a very slow track, hopefully I can post about them in the future.

I am very interested in CAD and RP and it's application in modeling areas. It looks like you and others here are doing some interesting work in this area. I look forward to comparing notes.

Dan

[W.P. Rayner]

Dan:

Thanks for the background info and I certainly look forward to your input on the RP process. The first obvious questions are, does your firm offer services as a service bureau similar to Fineline Protoyping and is there a web site I can visit to learn more about what your firm does? Though I have no issues with Fineline, they do excellent work and their service is top notch, I'm always open to other options.

Hoping you'll be able to make some time for your model projects, looking forward to seeing what sort of work you're doing.

Paul