The Home Machinist!

No doubt if you prefer perspective view, FreeCAD allows you to view that also. I don't design for selling, i don't have the time. I am making parts strictly for my own use. But I know it's problematic using many software for business use.

Yes you are right Bill, i took drafting and architecture in the 60s like most other students. And probably like yourself, i could visualize the actual object by looking at the three views.

Yes, you are right the drawings are 3D without perspective. You can convince yourself by measuring distances on the bezel and you will find the distance the same in front and back. The track looks odd because the angle you see the bottom edge is different than the angle you see at the top. Your brai...

On a more practical level, here is a Sailboat Port Bezel I designed to replace the thin plastic port bezel on our Catalina 400.

I use FreeCAD.. I started using it about 3 years ago to design for 3D printers. Perhaps one advantage I had is I had no preconceived notions about how 3D cad should work, so for me it was about learning. In the last 3 years I have generated hundreds of new designs and printed thousands of parts incl...

This capacitor has nothing to do with pulsating D.C. If you are worried about pulsations from a switcher, you have a poor switcher. A better way to reduce those pulsations is a cap between 12v and ground at the supply. No engineer will put a cap here to reduce pulsations. It's just the wrong place t...

. Any dwellers among the crowd here able to share what they know about why a capacitor is in parallel with the LED in the article and its function? John No question of why this cap is here. It is used to shunt high frequency RF signals around the diode. If you place an LED between a very long free ...

In my thesis of 2005 I devoted one and a half page to the effect of the Strouhal number which has exhaust beat frequency in it. At that time I noted already the research outside locomotives indicated increased performance with pulsation. My point of view is that in design and momentum calculations ...

1) using someone's 1898 opinion is not a strong argument in a scientific debate 2) just Googling "pulsating flow diffuser" will give a load of articles with conclusions like: ".....(2) The time-mean pressure rise is larger than that in the steady flow, ..." just meaning that in ...

A few years ago when I was designing my cylinders and exhaust pipe, I specifically looked at the size of the pipe as I wondered why the American designers used a plenum in the exhaust passage. It seems that the design of the engine requires the steam ways to have an area of 1/10 the piston area (at...

One last point... During the operation of the locomotive, the suspension is raising and lowering due to road bed undulations. In addition, the suspension is raising and lowering due to imperfect balancing of the wheels, side rods and main rods. This movement has a huge impact on the valve gear and p...

When you raise the cylinder center line.. It causes the reciprocating forces to somewhat come out of alignment with the vertical forces. So the reciprocating clearances in the brasses tend to be taken up slightly before the vertical clearances in the brasses. If the cylinder center line is lined up ...