by Jim Foster
Today, I wanted to share with you a different design. The gearbox shown below was created in To3D. The window is similar to last week’s viewable link, but it’s more interactive. If you click on "Open full page" here or in the window below, you’ll open a page where you can modify and update the gearbox by manipulating several dimensions. In the lower right is a message window that will lead you through the suggested changes. Make sure to open the window in a WebGL supported browser like Chrome or Firefox.
In this gearbox, if you modify the length of a shaft, all the shafts and the gear cases will update accordingly. Also, since the largest gear diameters were used to size the gear cases, modifying a gear diameter adjusts all the gears, shaft centers and gear case size.
I made this design to demonstrate the Top-Down nature of To3D. There are no equations or “extra” constraints to capture this interaction. There are probably less overall constraints than if this same design was made using a Bottom-Up approach in one of the mainstream solid modelers.
If you like the blog, you can sign up on the upper left to be notified of new posts and other updates about our progress.
In the meantime, we’d love to hear your comments about the ideas presented here about To3D and CAD in the cloud! To do so, just click on the comments link below.