Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Using SolidWorks to design an hourglass


Designing an hourglass by Solidworks is so easy:
  1. Create a 2D Sketch on Front-plane.
  2. Start drawing a glass profile on the plane.
  3. Use Revolve Extrude to create a glass.
  4. Then make a new 2D Sketch on Top-plane for drawing a lid.
  5. Draw a circle on the Top-plane Sketch.
  6. Create the lid via Extruding the circle.
  7. After that use Mirror feature to make the copy the body in other side.
  8. Now you can create a support.
  9. To have three supports, use Circular pattern.
  10. Finally filleting edges.
You can download hourglass sample file and open it by SolidWorks 2009 or higher version and then viewing tree-view to see the design elements and their structure:

Download Hourglass Sample File
.Zip = SolidWorks 2009 SLDPRT file (312 KB)