When my dog was just a puppy, I made the mistake of leaving my favorite umbrella in a place where she could knock it over and gnaw on the handle. She left just enough handle for me to still use the umbrella, but I figured I should finally get around to fixing it. Yes... it's taken me 7 years to commit to the project 😊
Maybe I was waiting for 3D Printing technology to be as awesome as it now is, or maybe I was waiting to have two awesome ways to model a replacement... Surface modeling in SOLIDWORKS, or sub-D modeling in xShape!
The first handle I designed was based off the original, where I inserted a picture as a reference and then sketched a series of splines to use in a closed loft. I revolved oversized patches for the top and bottom surfaces and then hit them with the remarkable 'Intersect' command which trimmed them into a solid in one fell swoop! A few small fillets and a hole to accept the umbrella post is all I needed to finish the design (though I embellished it a bit with two swept cuts).
I modeled a second handle using a sub-D feature in xShape - a sub-D cylinder to be precise. I love how you can size the bounding box of the primitive when you get started! That gets me right in the ballpark without having to rely on a reference image or sketch. It only took me a few minutes to refine the shape into something I liked, but let's be honest, you can spend a ton of time in xShape because it's just such a fun way of modeling!
I printed both handles so I could compare how they looked and felt when attached to the umbrella. What do you think? Which design do you like better?
Check out this video to see how I modeled each handle and how the whole project came together:
If you want to interrogate the models, or print them for yourself, feel free to download this zip file which contains both native SOLIDWORKS and xShape files as well as STEP and STL formats.
