3/8-16UNC bolt, nut, and washers.
3/8-16UNC bolt, nut, and washers.
Blender wasn't designed for precise, accurate work, but rather for artistic purposes. Building precise objects can be a real pain, because of the lack of CAD functions like fillet, solid intersection, etc, but it can be done.
Despite the difficulties, I do a lot of designing in Blender, mostly because it lets me animate my creations to see them in action (and because it's free). It even has a built-in game engine, which I use to apply physics (of a sort) to my contraptions to see if they actually work (and it's free). It's built-in rendering engine works quite well, and using the sequence editor, I can even assemble renderings into videos to show others (for free!). Did I mention that Blender is free?
I've heard good things about AutoDesk Inventor and SolidWorks, but Blender is ... I may have mentioned this ... free.
So, I thought I'd share my library of Blender files.
Most of these objects do not have any materials attached. I prefer to attach materials after I append them to whatever I'm working on (to avoid duplicate materials).
Most of these models represent real objects - I sat down with an example and a micrometer and modeled them. Examples of this are the Ford Remote Mirror Servo, and the Tuff Torq Transmission. Others were modeled based on drawings and dimensions given in manufacturer literature, such as the Alltrax motor controller, or from reference guides such as Machinery's Handbook.
A few, however, are purely conjectural, which is to say that I just pulled them out of my ... uh, I completely made them up from whole cloth: for example, the 2-cyl 2-stroke turbodiesel engine, conjured out of the thin air of my fevered and twisted imagination. Such conjectural objects contain "(typ)" in the filename.
Lastly, a few do not represent objects at all, such as the logarithmic spiral or the involute curve, or the electronic symbols, but are useful in creating other objects. (Involute curves used in making gears.)
Included is a Materials Library, and also a "tourist", which runs in the Blender Game engine and lets you "walk around" and tour (thus the name) architectural models.
In all these files, one Blender unit equals one inch. (And stop sending me "Stupid American, convert these to metric or else!" emails. Convert them yourself, asshole.)
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© 2010 W. E. Johns
