Farewell dear Louie, we will miss you so.

On Tuesday I finished the miniature rotary engine for Louie's plane. Being that it's all PVC plastic, I think the fuel economy might be pretty good. However, I may need to beef up the cooling system!

The other part of this equation is the propeller. Being that Louie will be displayed hanging in the air, I didn't want the static, fixed propeller look. I decided that I would back engrave a disk of acrylic so it would have some life to it. We also got heavy into the painting of Louie himself. Using several layers of glazes and texture.

Finally today he all came together like a well oiled machine. When I was doing the files for the fuselage, I put in 1/2"  locating holes for the wing supports. The wings will have 2 rods and a neodymium magnet, this will allow the wings to come off for shipping, but require no fasteners for when he arrives at his destination.

Goodbye sweet, sweet Louie, maybe we will meet again. Fly safe my good friend, fly safe.

8)
JO

More Louie

Sunday saw the final machining of all the HDU on Louie and his plane. This whole model was split in Aspire and cut from 2" material. The hands I modeled at 2" as well, knowing about the material thickness I was ordering. I decided that I didn't want to slice the hands for undercuts, but machine them as 1 piece each. This was a job for Cut 3D. If you aren't familiar with this software, it is made by Vectric, the same company that developed our Aspire software. Cut 3d is an extremely fast toolpathing software that allows up to 4 sides of a model to be machined. Aspire will certainly do this, but I find that Cut 3d makes the process so quick, and I can preview all machined sides in one model.

It also allows for quick setup of the tabs. You can see the four tabs that I added to the part, as well as the material block, in the picture. Tabs are used to hold the model to the block so it doesn't move or fall out when the cutter is making the part. I bought this software last year when we were making a bunch of chair molds for Disney Cruise Lines. It's very affordable software, so the job payed for the software after the first chair. Monday I got all the parts primed and the plane parts painted red. One of the other things I decided to do was draw and print the eyes. Because I wanted his goggles to have clear acrylic lenses, it just made sense to print the eyes. I will apply these graphics behind the lenses. In order to get the cut vectors for the lenses, I took the face model in Aspire and traced the bitmap from the 2d viewport. If you move the slider under the threshold setting, it basically moves the "cut plane" from the top of the model to the bottom in small layers. Once the threshold was around where the lenses would be on the model, I selected the 'fit vectors to bitmap' and this gave me the vectors for the inside opening of the goggle eye holes.

I exported the vectors for the lenses into our drawing software, as well as the packaging box artwork, and a pic of the actual toy. I used the vectors as guidelines for drawing the new eyes that I will print.

The eyes are very in-keeping with the box art. And as I drew it with using the vectors as a guideline, when I print them out, they will be at the exact size. I was also able to get a whole pile of painting done today, but left my camera at the shop, so no updated pictures today. There will be a whole pile of catch-up pictures tomorrow however, so tomorrow might be more of a visual blog than text!
8)
JO

Starting at 8 am just to get a head!

I started today at 8 to get a jump on cutting Louie. I had done all the model slicing in Aspire Thursday night, but when I measured the HDU today, it calipered out at 1.940". To bad I sliced all my models at 2". DOH! So I had to re-slice them all again at the right measurement. This is the first sheet of HDU I've gotten that was actually UNDER 2". So the moral of my story is.................................


Not a real big deal though. Aspire makes it very easy to generate cut boundaries for our Techno cnc, so I wasn't set back all that much. Like a kid at Christmas, I waited for the first part to come off the machine. Then I waited for the second part to be done so I could have something to do by gluing them up and filling the seams. Then the parts just kept on coming, and coming. I would do some seaming, generate toolpaths, start the router, glue them together, then repeat! The router quickly outpaced me. A friend stopped by, and upon watching my Techno cnc, commented that IT was the REAL artist, and I was the chump paying the power bill! That old guy might actually be on to something. Between the roughing and finishing passes on the router, each piece took a total of 18-20 min. each. Can't complain about that. Louie did need some clean-up coming off the machine, but as I didn't want to do a cutter changes all the time, I opted for manual labour on cleaning up the tool marks. HDU is pretty easy to work,

After awhile, I got all the head pieces together and filled. It's a little larger than I originally thought, but that makes it cool.

Because this guy is so big, He will need a little more detail than the supplied CAD file. One thing I did in Aspire, was to cut tail flaps and a rudder on the plane. I will place these slightly off center to give it a bit more character. In the image they sent of the box artwork, Louie is wearing an old aviator's jacket with the wool collar and cuffs. I mixed up a little urethane glue and spray-foam, and dabbed it to theses parts. Once the painting and glazes are done, it should look pretty cool.

We are on set tomorrow for the last HESS Gasoline shoot day, so I will get back to Louie on Sunday. As far as I know, he needs to be crated and delivered by Thursday, so I think we're good so far.

8)
JO

Let the modelling begin!

We delivered the columns and header today. I had to cut a few pieces of acrylic that would become the edge to the simple table we made. These edges stick up around 3" to prevent the motorized robot toys from committing suicide on to the floor. We wrapped the stuff up, and put it in the van and away we went. We got back to the shop around 3 and I got right to work on the Louie model. I had spent a little time last night working on the plane, but it quickly occurred to me that it would be best just to model the plane from scratch. The reason for this was that there was a baffling amount of geometry in the imported CAD file. When I exported the file out as an OBJ surface model, it looked good, but there was 2 surfaces for each inside and outside surface on the model. This meant to modify anything, I had 4 surfaces to deal with, and each surface was so close to the other ones, it took forever just to remove small sections. The other reason was that after I had detached the parts I wanted off, the model had so many holes in it, it looked like it had been thrown in a blender for a while. Even if I had persevered, I still had to deal with the pocket holes for the screws, etc. It would be way faster to start again. Just the plane though, I will change very little on Louie himself. I was able to take the CAD file, remove Louie and model the plane to a 2D outline image for the front/top/left and back view. With this outline image, I opened our other 3D software package, brought in the 2D images, and set them up as modelling blueprints. This gave me an un-distorted plan view from which to start modelling from.

It looks a little weird at this point, but the three views I'm interested in all line up perfectly.

I started with the nose cone of the plane, creating a cylinder and adjusting it to the image in all 3 of the views.

I then just started a new cylinder, and followed the contours of the plane images.

It doesn't show in the screen grab, but I actually have 3 simultaneous windows open, showing me the different views I need all at once. This allows me to tweak a portion and see it update in all the windows. When the fuselage was finished, I started on the wings. I used the blueprint as a size guide only.

Because our model will be HUGE compared to the toy, I felt that the small little wings lacked any sort of resemblance to a plane. I added some ribbing to the model to give it a stretched canvas kind of look.

Next was the rudder and tail fins. I didn't do much different than the drawing on these parts, except to shape the profile a little more like a wing shape.

Finally I closed off the nose cone with the recess like the toy has. On the toy, the engine parts are printed on a sticker and stuck in there, We will model a very simple rotary engine with a clear disk representing the 'spinning' propeller.

Here is the finished plane with the imported Louie model set in place. You can see all the dark grey lines on the plane and Louie, this is the wire cage for the model. By re-modelling the plane, you can see I have cut the geometry down by at least 90%. This will make it VERY easy to section the plane up for import into Aspire. for machining.

8)

JO

Louie and his plane

Today was pretty cool. We got all the fabricating on the showroom components done. Tomorrow I can start the priming and painting on those. Then they're ready for delivery. I still have to finish drawing all the vectors for the cool table we have to start ASAP. I really like the challenge of drawing all the parts in 2D vectors while trying to stay 3 steps ahead in-case I box myself into a corner. A corner that usually rears it's ugly head AFTER the parts are cut! I also received the proper file for Louie, so I will spend the weekend getting those prepped for machining at the beginning of the week. I think our HDU deliveries are Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I better get my order in soon!

I was able to split the head off the plane this evening. Now the nice thing about getting a CAD file from the manufacturer of a toy, is that generally all the parting lines are set up in such a way as to avoid undercuts. So I could easily use this model 'as is' and import it right into Aspire and go to town. However, we are modifying it a little, like removing the connector on the wing, and the hands from the plane. Plus we want to be somewhere between the box art and the toy. Stay Tuned.................

8)
JO

Louie's got a layover

I am quite excited today. Like a little kid. Loopin Louie arrived at my doorstep courtesy of UPS this morning. Loopin Louie is a kids game from back in the day. I do believe it's getting a re-release, and we have been asked to make a large version of Louie piloting his little red plane. Our version will have a 3 foot wingspan! After we're done, he will be flying all the way to Dallas for display. I received the files for him today, but they were in DWG format. You guessed it, no 3d data, just outline vectors. So with a quick email sent, I should have the files from Hong Kong any time now. I love computers and the internet! This job is gonna be fun for sure. While we are waiting for that, we have started work on the Spinmaster showroom stuff we were awarded. The one section is pretty straight forward, but there is a table for another part of the showroom that has me pretty excited as well. It's kind of a giant mechanical looking piece. That's what I'm talking about.

8)

JO