Preface
Plastic steering wheel is a new product we developed for a company. In the design process, the parting surface, the draft angle of the injection mold and the robustness of the structure should be considered. The structure seems simple, but it is complicated. This article mainly uses SolidWorks’ functions such as stretching adding, cutting and subtracting, rotating adding, rotating subtracting, mirroring, and filleting.
1. Formation of the basic entity of the scaffold
1.1 Start SolidWorks
Click “File”-“New” to create a new “part” file and save it in the designated folder in time.
1.2 Production of the main shaft of the steering wheel bracket
Open a plane and create a sketch. According to the basic shape of the steering wheel bracket, in order to better use the side view for observation, the “top view” should be selected as the first reference plane.
According to the design size, a sketch circle is generated and extruded into a boss entity. The drawing height is in accordance with the design height, and the draft angle is 0.3°.
1.3 Generate the bracket wheel steering part of the entity
Since the main shaft of the steering wheel and the steering shaft of the bracket wheel are not on the same plane, a reference plane of the corresponding distance must be established. Take the right-view datum plane as the datum and offset the corresponding distance to establish the datum plane.
Then create a rotation sketch on the base plane and specify the rotation axis.
Exit the sketch and use the “Rotate Addition” command to rotate 360° to generate the solid part of the bracket wheel steering. Note that in the “Rotate” command option, select “Merge entities”.
1.4 Generate the basic entity of the bracket
Open the sketch on the “front view datum plane” and draw the sketch of the reserved shape according to the design intent. After exiting the sketch, the two-way stretching completely penetrates the cutting material.
So far, the basic appearance of the steering wheel bracket has been generated. The following work mainly deals with internal shapes and details.
2. Treatment of internal shape
Because the internal structure is not evenly distributed, and in some places, the material is reduced by rotation, so the “shell” method cannot be used to obtain the internal structure. At this time, according to the characteristics of each part, use the “stretch reduction” and “rotation cut reduction” command operations.
2.1 Internal structure generation of wheel steering
Continue to use datum one. Open the sketch on the datum plane 1, draw the sketch contour according to the design wall thickness, rotate 360° to cut the material, and get the internal structure.
2.2 Partial structure generation of the main shaft
Establish datum plane two, specify a distance from the main axis, draw a sketch circle, cut off the material, and stretch it to completely penetrate, to obtain the partial structure of the main shaft as shown in Figure 8, and chamfer the top outer edge.
2.3 Complete generation of internal structure
Open the sketch on the “front view datum plane”, draw the cross-sectional shape of the steering wheel bearing cavity, and use the central axis of the main shaft as the rotation axis, and use the “rotate cutting and subtraction” command to rotate 360°, and the result is shown in Structure.
At this point, the internal structure of the steering wheel bracket is completely generated. Of course, if it is only for design purposes, Figures 8 and 9 can be generated in one step through the “rotary cutting and subtraction” command; but this design also provides the IGS file to be transferred to the CAM system for processing. In order to simplify the processing code, the most It is better to use the above steps.
3. Processing of details
The details are mainly the edge chamfering, the feature of the wheel boss and the generation of the ribs.
4 Conclusion
This structure can achieve the rated load of the design through the simulation analysis of the Simulation software; and use the design data for numerical control processing, the product size is stable, and the design purpose is achieved.
