TMNT Nunchucks Pencil Holder

This project was designed by Mark Li in collaboration with Casey Stengel. Link to Casey's page with our other office supply: https://www.printables.com/@CaseyStengel_2542632

About this project:

• Each nunchuck has a height of 10 cm and a length and width of 5.08 cm
• Each nunchuck's body, cap, and the rope all come as separate pieces
• The pencil holder will not stand uprights on its own; must be propped up or pressed down by something

Design Statement

Your group of two has been hired to design a set of theme-based organizational products.  Your team will design a set of office supplies that are tied together with a common theme. You must be able to justify the theme that connects the products together.  The idea is that the customer will not want to buy just one; they will want to buy the whole set.

Constraints

• You will be constructing an actual size model of your product in SolidWorks
• Your items must be interesting to look at and unique - a conversation starter.  An individual walking by would do a double take to more closely examine the amazingly artistic item you’ve created.
• Your items must contain examples of ALL FOUR main Features:  Extrusion, Revolve, Sweep, Loft (All Features DO NOT need to be present in each piece, just amongst the set)
• Your items must take advantage of at least one of: Circular Pattern, Linear Pattern, Sketch-Driven Pattern, Mirror (All Features DO NOT need to be present in each piece, just amongst the set)
• ALL of your items must take advantage of Filleting and maybe Chamfering
• Each piece you design should fit within a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm cube, or 1000cm3 volume equivalent. (Each item can be multiple pieces to be assembled for easier printing. Maximum length in any direction is limited to 20cm (slightly negotiable, MAYBE 27cm max))
• Should be 3D printable with limited/no supports, (each item can be multiple assemblable pieces to help this)

Design Choices

Casey and I created a straightforward plan to assembly our nunchucks pencil holder on SolidWorks: we would create the body of the nunchuck first and draw the patterns over it, add the caps on the top and bottom of the body, mirror over to create the other nunchuck, and connect both pieces with a rope. However, as with all engineering projects, we adjusted our original plan many times along the way when working on SolidWorks in order to make our product as good as possible.

Original Sketch Plans (note: we originally used inches in our original drawing plan, but converted our dimensions into centimeters to be optimized for SolidWorks)

The first change Casey and I made to our design was changing the extrusion height of the nunchuck bodies from 5.08 cm to 10 cm. This was because upon seeing that a height of 5.08 cm looked too squashed in SolidWorks, we decided to increase the height to 10 cm in order to make it look more realistic.

Another change we made to our design was changing the dimensions of the caps to look more realistic as well. Our original design plan had the caps at a diameter of 7.62 cm, which looked way too big on the 5.08 cm diameter of the bodies. So, we decided to scale down the caps to a diameter where it looked only a little wider than the bodies in order to make it look better.

Third, when trying to make the patterns on the bodies of the nunchucks, we had included just the Cut Sweep in our original plan and forgotten to include the Mirror that would be required to make it work. As we worked on SolidWorks, we of course realized this and added it to our plan.

And last, we had originally decided to make a bunch of little circles to combine into a flower shape for the face of the rope. However, when we set out to make the rope on SolidWorks, we ended up deciding that fewer but bigger circles seemed to look more like a braided rope. Thus, we ended up decreasing the number of circles down to 6.

Final Design Images