By Vincent Zhao | 9/26/2024

Here, I’ll walk through my experience with the first two tutorials of my CAD learning journey: Introduction to Part Design and Introduction to Parametric Feature-Based CAD. These tutorials focused on foundational skills like sketching and extruding, which are important for turning 2D drawings into 3D models.

After completing the sketch, the next step was to take that 2D drawing and extrude it into a 3D object. The tutorial provided step-by-step instructions on how to select the sketch and use the “extrude” feature to transform it into a solid object. Based on the tutorial, I was able to correctly follow it up to now.

However, I encountered a frustrating challenge during this phase. The instructions were somewhat unclear, and when I tried to extrude the sketch, it did not yield the correct result. I later realised that the layout had to be drawn from a flipped, which was not what the tutorial showed.

After a short while, I was able to do it:

Revolve exercise: 

The next practice was by far the most difficult and confusing task so far, as the tutorial instructions were difficult to follow and demanded specific results from brief directions. 

Initially, I was stuck on designing the 2d shape and had a very difficult time correctly formatting the dimensions. For an even line with the midpoint centered on the Y axis, two lines of equal distance need to be drawn, and a line drawn over them for that to occur – which was one of the biggest obstacles.

However, shortly after figuring out the proper setup, I was able to correctly map it out and extrude the shape into a thin cylinder:

Assembly exercise:

Next, I moved onto the assembly tutorial

This section was also quite frustrating and weird to initially setup, especially with the triad manipulator’s Z axis, and aligning the Z axis to the diagram.

But in the end, I managed to successfully complete it and got the correct mass:

Water bottle

After this tutorial, I decided to begin and design my own product to test my knowledge. With a simple design and only some materials, I found that it would be a good display of skills to design a simple water bottle.   

These are some reference photos online:

The premise of a water bottle is very straightforward. For the outline, I simply create a basic water bottle shape, then use the revolve tool to turn the bottle into a solid bottle. 

Then, with some guidance from my peers, I was able to properly set up the shell tool, and then added fillet layers to the design to make it look more natural – for the ideal hollow water bottle shape! 

This is the outline of my bottle, now all that’s left is to make the cap in other parts studio and then put them together to demonstrate assembly skills.

This is what it looks like after I extruded a small cylinder shape to make a fitting hole for the water bottle. I even extruded out the bottom to make it hollow and an actual cap which I could put onto the bottle base.

I realized that the cap was smaller than the bottle, so now I had to measure the top of the bottle to make sure that it is the size of the inner circle of the cap, which is 1.412243 cm * 2 = 2.824486 cm

After some redo’s and trial and error periods, I was able to finalize the bottle, and put them into the assembly together

After some tweak ups and coloring, I am finished building the main parts and assembly: 

Then finally, to finish, I made a mechanical drawing with the bill of materials for future aspiring water bottle engineers to replicate this grand mechanism that I designed.

Here is my process of showing how I mated the two parts together, with a slider and limits.