Hybrid design effort with CAD

Last winter I decided to redo the center console on my fishing boat. There were too many instruments in the main console at the helm and I just bought a new chart plotter and had no place to put it. I decided that a secondary console above the dash would do the trick as I had the space. I could then move my VHF and stereo up there giving me the space I needed.  The "first" problem was the box shape. I needed maximum space but did not want to reduce the view looking upward from the dash. Grabbing a yard stick and compass, I figured out that I needed a "line of sight" of about 12 degrees above the horizontal from where I like to stand at the helm.

With that and a few other measurements, I cranked out a basic volume shape in CAD. This was the primary reason I had decided to employ CAD in the first place for this project though other values quickly appeared. I then applied the "old school" approach of cutting away all the excess material - you know, "build a coffee pot by cutting everything away that is NOT a coffee pot"...
​​​​​​​...resulting in the box I wanted.

Another place where the CAD really was needed was getting the shape of the front and back plates. I was going to simply print it at full scale over at the Office Depot but decided to just create a "driven sketch" off the front and back faces and extract some datum points...

I then used a 1/4 x 1/4 strip of mahogany bent around the jig created from the points...

The rest of the build was just projections off of the plates and quite a few check fits...

And then installation of a bit of wiring and back out on the ocean!

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