Whale Print-in-place fidget

Have you ever felt boredom in any situation? You well never have to feel that again with our Whale shaped fidget! With zero assembly required, it is very easy to set up. It can even make a lot of noise like a maraca!

Design Statement

You will create a telescoping fidget device by utilizing sketch offsets and drafted extrusions/cuts.

You and your partner will be “accountabilibuddies”. This means you will provide feedback on initial designs and plans, as well as help each other solve problems and troubleshoot errors as they happen. You are NOT REQUIRED to have identical designs, but it will certainly make the process easier. In this project, Michael Agnew was my accountabilibuddy and you can check out his Printables page here:

Me and Michael decided to create a fidget of a whale. We decided to do a whale because we were scrolling through reference pictures and we found a whale that caught our attention. 

Constraints
 

• There must be a constraint box
• The outline must have an area less than or equal to 64 cm^3
• Use of dimensions/relations must be efficient
• It is not required to fully define your entire sketch, but it will help.
• The sketch must contain zero error messages.
• Demonstrate efficient use of “Offset Entities”

Design in Solidworks

First off, we created a constraint box with dimensions 11.5cm by 5.5cm. Inside of which, we used the following steps:

(All Offsets are by 0.1 cm)

1. First, we started to create the sketch of our reference picture using the three point arc tool and the line tool. (DO NOT USE SPLINE TOOL IT WILL NOT OFFSET). We did not use any specific dimensions or relations for this.
2. Next, we split the tail into two parts using the line tool.
3. After, we offset every line individually in the tail, then trimmed the edges.
4. We then repeated step 3 for the other side.
5. Then we offset the body of the whale.
6. Then, we deleted the middle lines in the tail.
7. Now, we selected the chain of each inner shape and offset them individually repeatedly, until it could not be offset anymore.
8. Then, we extruded the sketch by selecting the outermost layer and blind extruding it by 0.75cm with an angle of 15°.

     9. Then, selecting the second outermost layer, we used the extruded cut tool with the                       through all setting at 15 degrees, while also clicking the switch directions button to                     create the hollow second layer. 

     10. Next, we extruded the third layer from the outside, using the “up to surface” setting. We            extruded up to the surface of the first extrusion, by 15 degrees again.  

     11. We then repeated steps 9 and 10, alternating, with every layer.

     12. We then mirrored the entire model over the front plane, making sure to check the                   “merge solids” box.

Design changes

We made a section of the tail solid to make it into two different sections.

A line and curve at the base of the tail were not tangent, which was breaking the offsets. So, we used the tangent relation to fix that.

Version 1: Angles of extrusion were at 15 degrees and height was 0.5cm. However, the pieces came apart too easily.

Version 2: We changed the height of the extrusion to 0.75cm, which fixed our problem.

Version 3:We kept the height at 0.5cm, but changed the angle to 23 degrees which would also fix the problem.