[Irinikus]

Today I thought I'd be a bit more daring, so I made a ball bearing:







This was slightly more challenging!

[hamei]

Today I thought I'd be a bit more daring, so I made a ball bearing:

Perfect example of the strength of this program - turn this into a deep groove ball bearing by enlarging the outer diameter of the inner race and decreasing the i.d. of the outer race, and then add another roller 'cuz she looks a little light in the balls department No need to remodel, just change your parameters.

Then hit regen.

Enjoy ! Watch it change on-screen.

Oh. No need to worry about ruining your model and having to start over, ProE creates trailfiles as you go along so until the point where you purposely delete those, you can always back up and recreate the model.

p.s. Looking at your tree, I bet you have a problem The easiest way to create a model is not always the 'easiest' ove the long term .... you should be able to change those dimensions without affecting the ball race track, but looks like this is not what you did ? That surface of revolution tool can be too easy initially but too inflexible over the long term .... I probably would have made that as two extrusions for the races with revolved cuts for gothic arch tracks, gives you more flexibility than putting all the features into a single sketch. But everyone does things thier own way, not criticizing, just pointing out another method.

If you were going to make a whole series of single-row ball bearings, you could figure out what relationships you planned to use, then make a single model accordingly. After that, whatever size you want would be just a matter of changing the dimensions. You can use equations as dimensional parameters, too. If you think it out hard enough, you'd only have to change one dimension and the entire model would regen to become a different size.

btw ii, if you did this as an assembly instead of a single model, you could animate it to have all the individual pieces move like a real ball bearing. Same principles but you make each part as a separate model, then start an assembly file and pull all the pieces in together. In fact you could do that easily with this model, you have all the pieces already.

[Irinikus]

Thanks for the input, I really appreciate it! If I split this part scene into various parts, will I be able to create an assembly from them?

I decided to rebuild the model with better proportions, and converted it to a white ceramic bearing just for shits and giggles.

I also messed around with there renderer, which seems to deliver decent enough results!

Here the image is being rendered in a room with the rather cheesy textures provided by Pro Engineer:



Here's the result:



Here the image is being rendered with a black background:



Here's the result:

[hamei]

If I split this part scene into various parts, will I be able to create an assembly from them?

You need to make a model for each individual part, then you can start an "assembly" (from that dropdown "file" title) which is a collection of individual models. One nice thing there is that if you edit a component in assembly mode, it also changes the model's individual definitions simultaneously.

When you are hopping around between windows, you have to remember to click on the one you want to work in to make it the "active" window. That's automatic now but I kinda remember being annoyed by that in the beginning. "Why the heck isn't it doing anything ? grrr ! ... oh"

Then you can go into drafting mode and make yourself a 2d print directly from the model. If you later on change the print, that will backstep to update the model

In an assembly, you choose your base model, then you add the other models to that. There's a bunch of ways to orient the various pieces, depending on what you want to do.

You can probably bang your way through this one just by trying stuff, but must be some decent Level One tutorials around on that. I'm sure I have some but where oh where have my files all gone, oh where oh where did I put them ?

I decided to rebuild the model with better proportions, and converted it to a white ceramic bearing just for shits and giggles.

You could make it a hybrid - steel races, bronze or plastic cage, and ceramic balls. Under the analysis menu, you can set the materials then it will give you the weight of the model, center of gravity, and some other information. You can also do much more realistic renderings with reflections and lights and all that but I'm not much help there, mostly just did simple one-light, basic colors kind of things. I haven't messed with animations too much either but ball bearings are pretty simple, no linkages or anything, might be fun to see what speed ratio you come up with between inner race vs outer race, with the balls slowly orbiting the inner race ...

I also messed around with there renderer, which seems to deliver decent enough results!

You are absolutely right about one thing, their background texture barely qualifies as cheesy ! In fact, I think it's two steps below that ! But you can import better ones easily.

You changed the pattern definition then clicked "regen" hunh ? Cool ?

c'mon JP, get in on this ! It's time to drag that program outta the closet !

[Irinikus]

I went and created a set of models to assemble the bearing: (Required to assemble a ceramic/steel composite bearing)

The inner race: (White ceramic)



The bearing race: (Steel)



Ball: (White ceramic)



The outer race: (White ceramic)

[Irinikus]

Here's the complete assembly:

[Irinikus]

This is the final product: