drawing the engine

These days I am spending some time drawing in 3D all the standard components that will be used in the Moto2. With standard I mean all those components already existing and well defined (engine, brakes, suspensions, rims, tyres,etc). Once I had all these parts drawn and located in it’s position, I will be ready to start working on those parts that I must design and build (chassis, subframe, airbox, fueltank, bodywork, etc).

The first component I have drawn is the engine, a Kawasaki ZX6 2009 one. One of the design goals is to achieve a very compact bike, with an ergonomy as similar as possible to a 250 GP bike, so it is advisable to draw the components in a very precise and detailed way, in this way it will be easier to make the most of the avaiable room.

At the time to draw the engine, I thought about using a scanner. Nowadays there are very cheap scanners, like Nextengine which costs around $3000. This Handyscan is not so cheap, but it is impressive to watch how it works.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7DMEXGLHNc[/youtube]

The problem is that with a scanner you get a points cloud, that it is necessary to convert to a “solid”, which is the kind of format I need to work with CAD. The process of converting the points cloud to a solid takes quite some working time. There are softwares which make this task in an automatic way (I never tested one, and I don’t know how well they work), but they are expensive. I also asked companies which offer scanning service, but the cost was quite high. So finally I drew the engine following the “classic” method, meassuring with a caliper, squares, straight edges, etc.

Chassis mounting points are meassured with a 3D meassuring machine, so they are located with a precission of hundredths of milimeter.

I think that the rest of the engine has been drawn with 1 mm tolerance, more or less. Regarding time, it took 2 days of work (a whole weekend). Maybe I could draw it less detailed, but I think I wouldn’t save too much time anyway. 

[tags]moto2, engine, CAD, 3D, scanner[/tags]