Fire Eater, the Simple Steam Engine

I've been wanting something more complicated to model lately, so I went online and found a site for steam engine enthusiasts, downloaded some plans, and started modeling. And after a day and a half, here's what I've got:

I don't have everything in yet, but it's coming. This was really an exercise in assemblies more than modeling. I learned a lot of neat new things about putting objects together that I didn't know before. Three cheers for self-paced learning!

A Letterpress Arm Assembly in Inventor!

Last night, Amy and I took dinner and our electronic devices over to my brother's house. Rob, my brother, owns a letterpress studio which has a massive array of mechanical pieces (great for modeling). So, after dinner I went out to the studio and modeled the crank arm on a press.

This was an interesting exercise for me. The project presented a couple of challenges that I had not dealt with previously, primarily that the arm assembly tapered on all three axes, in addition to having a job in it. This was also my first assembly (meaning that I created multiple components and then incorporated them together into a single model). It took a bit to find the options to constrain the measurements and figure out how they work for assemblies, but in the end it came out pretty nicely!

Next step for this is to add a screw to the end of the handle and some holes at the top of the crank to hold it on a rod that projects from the press.