The Eyes… - 3D scanning – reverse “designeering” in Solidworks

I’ve chosen the most complicated part of the vehicle to start the assembly process : the front suspension, and steering mechanism.  The complexity is due to the many pivoting axis and moving parts.

Time has come to start the construction process!

No enormous exhausts for the electric version ...

Creating side views in Photoshop to explore character lines and proportions, allmost there..., the inlet in the front wheel needs correction.

In the photoshop rendering of the previous blogpost, it was clear for me that some shapes and proportions were not yet ok. The most efficient way to solve this is, is creating a side view line drawing with Bezier curves. These are very easy to manipulate, while maintain smooth transitions. In this way, with the side view rendering in the background, it’s possible to easily optimise proportions and creating character lines without losing the feel with the 3D model.

The most fun part of this project is the conceptual design and making nice visualisations, and in a later phase the real assembly and construction.  But sticking with a digital pencil alone will not be enough to built a functional vehicle. Therefore you need technical drawings of every single part of the end product.  All the parts need to be constructed and engineered, and finally produced. Creating and detailing technical drawings is unfortunately needed and they are less fun to do, but that's compensated when the final parts come out of the laser cutter.

In the previous blog post around the frame concept, the preliminary version was already shown. In order to maintain construction flexibility, and knowing that things probably will not be “first time right”, the final frame design consist of multiple bolted-on subframes (different colors in the pictures), that can easily be disassembled and modified when needed. The red color indicates what is re-used from the initial Ducati frame.

The Donor… Zero versus Ducati

Thanks to modern CAD tools as e.g. Solidworks, the conversion from side view sketch to 3D model is not too hard. Using the "sketch picture" tool eases this process a lot. Although there's quite some surface functionality in Solidworks, I prefer to  limit the use of surfaces as much as possible.

Luckily today's technology allows us to design and simulate idea's in a digital model, before constructing anything physical.  This surely will save time and money. 

Product development is all about finding many solutions, analysing and evaluating each of them, and continuing with the best compromise.