This is it. The last of the reverse engineering of the composting toilet series. All that remains are the four knobs on the lower drawer of the humanure maker.

.

The exact profile of the knobs is somewhat shady, but with a bit of educated guesswork, they’ll come out great for all intents and purposes. In the image below, you can see that I started by creating a sketch on the lower front face, then placing and centering a point on what I would call the right hand stile of the poo drawer.  The next step is to create a plane 90° to the face using the construction line that was used to center the point horizontally.

The only difference between this plane created on a line and the others in this series is that I selected the line, then instead of one of the Origin planes, I selected the face that the line sits on. The angle was left at the default 90°…   Read the rest of this entry →

Most of the things that remain to be modeled to complete this project have been covered earlier, and are relatively easy – the four knobs on the front are the last challenge.

.

I’ll run through some of the procedures that weren’t covered earlier and get the rest of the stuff modeled in this post. If there is time, I’ll move right into the knobs to finish this up, otherwise, there’ll be one more post in this series.

On the side of the unit, there is some sort of hatch that will be represented in this model as a shallow groove in the surface, and a tapped drain hole –both of which are procedures covered earlier in this series, but there are differences that should be shown. To begin, I created a plane on the furthest right horizontal edge of the model (could also have been completely off the model).   Read the rest of this entry →

I’ll begin this post by going all the way back to the first extrusion in this model to fix an error I made way back then. It will go a long way to demonstrate the power of parametric modeling.

The problem was that during the first extrusion, I inadvertently included the profile of the front reinforcing ribs in the selection set, giving the entire lower front an angle that it should not have. To fix this mistake, all I did was double click on the offending extrusion, get the profile selector from the dialog, hold down the shift button on my keyboard, and select the profile I want to remove from the selection set…

Read the rest of this entry →

In the last post in this series,  I left off with a very basic reverse engineered part….which in many cases would be all that is required. In this post I will further refine the model to look less  blocky.

I’ll try to add some polish to the model by performing one more cut using the front profile, cleaning up the artifacts on the top, adding the fillets, creating the pipes on the sides, rounding this and removing that, and adding the hardware…..some of which will likely spill into the next post.

The Front Cut.

In order to perform this cut procedure, I placed another instance of the Front block on a plane I created at the very frontmost extent of the model. To create the plane, I selected the edge shown in the image below (cyan line),  then the YZ plane in the Origin folder.  In the dialog that popped up, I changed the default 90° Angle setting to 0°, then clicked the green check mark to accept the value…

Read the rest of this entry →

In the last installment, I re-scaled the image that represents the drawing of the part to be reverse engineered, and created a tracing of the part. Today I begin the modeling.

With the tracing of the side profile complete, there is just one more quick step to complete this profile —create a Sketch Block from it. To do so,  I window selected the tracing as shown in the image to the right, and from the Layout panel of the Sketch tab, I choose the Create Block tool. That brought up the warning “Projected geometry is not supported by blocks. Select ‘OK’ to create the block without the projected geometry” as shown in the image below…

Read the rest of this entry →