This is just an exercise to sharpen my skills in Fusion. The goal was to practice re-creating specific bodies and joints. Learned a lot from doing this. There were a lot of dimensions that I simply assumed were parallel, when in fact there were subtle things that were off.
The arms were the hardest part of this build. Most of the other pieces were pretty parametric. The arms were a little organic and finding the right angles and dimensions was tricky.
Tricks
- The outside thigh is not perpendicular to the foot/ground. In fact, there is a slight bow inwards, making the feet wider than the hips.
- The face cutout for the helmet is not perpendicular so the shell of the helmet, which means you can not de-boss the cutout. In fact, you need to cut the opening directly from the left/right sides, making the edge of the cutout appear thicker than the actual thickness of the helmet.
- The strap around neck (for the tanks on the back) are not a perfect U shape. In fact, the traps bow inwards towards the tank ever so slightly.
- Given the properties of PLA, I designed the joints to take advantage of the slight flexibility of the plastic. The male part of the joints are segmented to provide some tolerance, and the female parts of the joints had filets to help guide the parts in to snap together. Once the piece is snapped in, chamfers on the male help to keep it gently in place and allow for some wiggle room.
I added tolerance in the designs of about 0.1mm to 0.2mm to the joints based on what I know about my 3D printer. However, I think those need to be removed because if I print a scaled version, the tolerance will scale with it, which doesn’t make sense because the accuracy of the printer doesn’t increase with the size.