Help with Flywheel spokes

[Anonymous]

I am very much a newbie to CAD. Attached, hopefully, is a flywheel I have sketched from a plan. Its all good except that the spokes, which are tapered, need to be elliptical in shape, not rectangular as shown. I thought about using the fillet command but I cant get the fillet command to only select the straight lines of the spokes. So, can anyone give me an idea of how to make the spokes elliptical please. Thank you for your time.

[TheCADWhisperer]

I would do one spoke as an Extruded Ellipse with taper

or Loft between two Ellipse 

and then Pattern Feature and add Fillets.

What are the specs for the spokes?

[Anonymous]

Thanks CADWhisperer. Specs are - Hub end, 15mm wide by 10.5mm and for the outer end of the ellipse, 13mm wide x 9mm. I did think of redesigning the flywheel starting with an extruded ellipse and/or using the loft between the 2 ellipses but I need to learn more to get familiar with those commands - I only started learning Fusion 360 about 2 weeks ago! Anyway, your comments have confirmed my thoughts so its back to the learning tutorials for me! Thank you again. BTW, where you able to look at my sketch/model. Was it OK?

[jeff_strater · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous,

You are right that using Fillet is probably not going to get you where you want to be, if your goal is an elliptical cross-section.  In the screencast below, I show one way to achieve what I think you want - starting out deleting your rectangular, extruded spokes, and creating some sketches to allow you to loft one spoke, then patterning the spoke around your flywheel:

Hope this is clear.  The screencast has audio, as well.

Jeff

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much Jeff. I'm amazed. What you did in a few minutes would take me 6 hours!. I will be going through your screencast several times. I really appreciate the time you took to do the screencast. Best regards to you. Pete