Align a group of bodies with a curved surface

[haniysf]

Hi,

In the attached file, I'm trying to align a group of small bodies to the inside of a curved surface and define a slide join between them, is this doable? If not, what would a good workflow be to achieve this task ?

BR

Hani

[paul.clauss]

Hi @haniysf

Thanks for posting! While I was a little unclear on the joint you are trying to create, I have attached a screencast below showing how I would begin approaching this issue

Please let me know if this helps you move forward! If I misunderstood the problem, could you attach a screenshot showing the motion you would like to allow with this joint? That could help us continue troubleshooting.

Kind Regards,

[haniysf]

Hi Paul,

Thank you for responding,

The joint I'm after is a slide of the small bodies along the surface and not through the holes, you may have noticed the matching size of the bodies and the holes, these small bodies resemble closing plates for the holes and they are supposed to move horizontally to increase or contract the size of the openings, the range of movement for every plate is the size of the opening.

The challange I'm facing is two fold, first of them is moving the plates to touch the surface, and the second is to have them depart from the flat state they have now and align (re-orient) with the curvature of this surface.

I hope I was able to clarify the task at hand.

BR

Hani

[haniysf]

Hi Paul,

While waiting for you response to my clarifications, I came-up with the following workflow to reach my goal, but unfortunatelly the split face or body does not complete.

Here are the steps in the workflow:

1- Project the sketch curves of the plates onto the fin surface.

2- Defined a selection set comprising the sketch curves.

3- Split the Fin surface using the projected curves, this would (theoretically) result in faces equal to the number of curves plus a fin skin that has openings equal to the same number and sizes of the sketch profiles.

4- I would then thicken the fin outwards by 2cm

5- Thicken the new group of faces inwards by 1cm, and maybe move them inwards by 0.5-1 mm to get some tolerance.

6- scale the group of bodies by .1% to give it an overlap with the edges of the Fin openings.

7- then I would go about tackling the sliding joint part.

So, as I mentioned earlier, the split face/body (I tried both) did not complete, I would start the command in patch environment, Select the face, then use the selection set I defined as the splitting tool and it would stop their asking for the splitting tool (although it is populated in the dialogue box).

I'm attaching the file for you to try to replicate what I want to do, you may be able to find out what is wrong here.

BTW, my action steps are on (Components2:1)

BR

Hani

[paul.clauss]

Hi @haniysf

Thanks for the clarification! 

Firstly, it looks like the split bodies/ faces commands were not working for you because your selection set includes all the sketch points along with the profiles. The sketch points are confusing the split tools and not allowing the command to be input. To work around this, you will need to select the profile for each cut individually - a time consuming process! You could work around this by creating one split and then using a feature pattern to create the others.

Another issue I see coming up here is that you will not be able to create a joint in which the small sliding pieces slide along the three dimensional surface, as we do not currently have an "Along Path" type of joint. Because the curvature of the surface the sliding pieces will sit on is not constant, you will not be able to create a joint in which the sliders re-orient normally on the curved surface when they are moved. A request for a joint along a curved path has been made at the Fusion 360 Ideastation - please give a vote there if you would like to see this function included in future versions of Fusion 360.

Kind Regards,

[haniysf]

Paul,

Thank you for the information, would you be able to demonstrate the feature pattern for the split you mentioned in your response, a small screencast would be a great help.

BR

Hani

[haniysf]

HI Paul,

I just tried the feature pattern and guess what, it didn't work also, have look at the screencast attached, what am I missing here? can you show me how this is done?

BR

Hani

[paul.clauss]

Hi @haniysf,

Thanks for the reply! It looks like you were not able to create the pattern on path because the path either because the selection for body to pattern was lost (you can see there is no object selected in your "Pattern on Path" dialogue box) or because the path you selected does not lay on the same surface as the body to be patterned.

To work around this, you need to project the path guidelines onto the curved surface and then pattern the body. I have illustrated this in the screencast below:

Unfortunately, because the curvature of the body being patterned is unique to its initial position on the curved face, the patterned bodies will not lay perfectly flush on the curved face at the new positions. For this reason, it may be better to create an extruded cut from your original sketch through the surface and then patch each hole individually. This will be more time consuming but will give your model a better finish. I have illustrated this technique in the screencast below:

Please let me know if you have any other questions!

[paul.clauss]

My mistake - the second screencast seems to have not attached! Here it is:

[haniysf]

Hi Paul,

Thank you for your help and support,

I guess the none-uniform curvature of the fin my main challenge, and the manual approach is inevitable for my case, but I used split body instead of Extrude and patch, this saved me some time as I did not need the patch step.

BR

Hani

[paul.clauss]

@haniysf,

Good call with the split bodies - I did put a redundant step in there! Nice catch! Good luck with the model and feel free to let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,