SOLIDWORKS XDesign - Grammy Award

Hey everyone! I'm Gemma Beatty and I would like to share a project I made with the SOLIDWORKS cloud apps. As someone relatively new to SOLIDWORKS and parametric design in general, I wanted to challenge myself with the new skills I've developed in the past since discovering these awesome tools. In the ideation for this project, I wanted to create an object that would require a vast range of features to form it. Inspired by my teammate Aidan McCormack's NBA trophy, I decided to do a trophy that was near and dear to my passions, a Grammy! As an avid music lover, I thought this was the perfect project to not only design, but bring to life through 3D printing. 
 

XStudio Render


One challenge I faced was with creating the more complex curvature, such as the tone-arm and the horn. I had knowledge of basic extrusions, but creating the pipe like shapes was something that I had yet to develop, until faced with it in this project. To make the tone arm (which was one of the hardest parts), I used an offset XY Plane to draw a sketch upon. From this I used the Sweep command to create the U-like shape of the tone arm. To create the elbow the tone-arm was connected to, I used two three point arcs to form the unique curve, and then used Sweep again to create the pipe shape. From there I placed a circle extrusion on the end of the sweep to create the base for the horn portion. To create the horn, I created a Sketch profile of the curve dimensions in order to create a Revolve. From here, I had the shape, and the final step was hollowing the horn. For this, I used the Shell command, which provided the exact shape I wanted.

The tone arm in the making
The revolve profile for the horn.
The shell feature in action!


After the shape was completed, I was ready to bring my design to life with the 3D printer. I used the Bambu Labs P1S in the Boston Fabrication Lab to create an (almost) life size Grammy! 


To polish everything off, I brought my design over to 3D Render to publish some cool images using cloud based rendering. The rendering process was intuitive, and I was quickly impressed by how easy it was to product high-quality images. Overall, my experience with the SOLIDWORKS Cloud apps was great and will definitely be using them for my future projects.  I loved the ease at which the commands were at my fingertips, and how effective they were in the creation of this design!