For this project we have collaborated with Christopher McConway in order to impliment functionality in both the fabrication and structure of our shape from the impluse response recorded in Westminster Station. In discussion and with his perspective in Mechanical Engineering he was able to divide the shape for us into 25 layers divided into two sections each. This is an excerpt from his notes on doing the porject with us and images demonstrating the procedure.
” Import base FBX file into Fusion 360, as an unstitched surface.”
“Use the “patch” Feature, within the “surface” tab of the fusion360 modelling environment, to mend/close the open ends of the “Unstitched Surface”. You can see, in the screenshot (Fig1) attached, that before using this the patch feature the body is essentially hollow. Using the patch feature is fundamentally adding another surface that will represent the top/bottom of the body. Visually this will make the body seem complete but it is still hollow (Fig2).”
“At this stage the model consists of THREE separate surfaces”
“To combine these separate surfaces use the “Stitch” feature (Fig3), this will collate the surfaces into one SURFACE BODY, model remains hollow.”
“The next objective is to “Create” a solid body from these three surfaces that will essentially fill the empty space within the boundaries of the surfaces. The tool used is call “Boundary Fill”, seen in Fig4.”
“The model can then be exported from Autodesk Fusion as a STEP file. For simplicity down the line, I choose to go with a step file as it can be imported straight into SolidWorks as a solid body, avoiding working between meshes and solids. In an early test export, using meshes and solids, only the solid features I had added to the model were preserved when exported as IGES, which wasn’t ideal.”
“Once the export is complete, import this file into SolidWorks. The benefit of the step file here being that I can start modifying the model immediately.”
“The first step in SolidWorks is to scale the model up, to meet the desired end dimensions. You can see in Fig5 that I scaled the body up by a factor of 9, increasing the height of the body from 50mm to 450mm.”
“I then chose a direction to which I would model the flat surfaces to house the electrical components. This happened to be the right plane in the case of *MODEL NAME*, as I felt it demonstrated the complex geometry of the body more favorably than the other planes. I then created another plane parallel to the front plane that was coincident with the boundary of the body (Fig6).”
“From here I made a series of extruded bosses and cuts to form the 170mm outer diameter flat surface for the speaker to mount to. The extruded cut at this stage was made as a circle into the original imported body. This gave me what I needed to now shell the body without sacrificing the top or bottom of the original body. You can see this in Fig7. Shell parameters were set to create an 18mm thick “wall”.”
– I then created the features that would house the tweeter, with the centers of the two holes aligned vertically and spaced 160mm.
– After adding the main geometry to hold the speakers, I made some adjustments to minimize the protrusions from the original surface. You can see the final geometry in Fig8.
– The body was then separated into 18mm thick layers to suit the selected material. I did this by adding split lines every 18mm, the finished product seen in Fig9.
– This model was then exported as an IGES file. I imported this IGES file back into fusion360 to check the geometry.
