hi

seems as its gonna be a while before i can afford to build it i fancy modeling my locost in cad so i can play around witht he desigh a bit,

i'm just curious if anybody on here has done it so i can ask for some tips especially for how to find the sizes for parts off the doner car so i can model them without having bought them ?

I have.

If you take a looky at my website, yu will find pics of my CAD models, along with files to download.

I didnt bother with modelling donor parts, as you will soon realise when you get stuck into it, that there really is no point...it will take you long enough to do the chassis and bodywork.

If you need a copy of ProD (legal) give me a shout.

David

looking good, thats what i'm planning to do, i'm hoping it will give me a better understanding of the car and as i want to build mine as a bec i can see where to change it,

i'm going to use autodesk inventor 10, which is a pretty nifty program, being a lazy engineering student and having far too much time on my hands i might stress analyse the frame, but we'll see

Inventor is very good, I played around with it at work last summer.

Where are you studying and what are you doing? I'm doing a Manufacturing Eng course at Warwick. All good fun, but got a load of assignments to do atm

David

doing mechanical engineering and design at newcastle upon tyne,

getting my own copy of inventor, if your a student you can get the full version for £188 , only restriction is you cant make money off anything you design off it but thats not a problem,

was thinking about doing the stress analysis because the school has ansys workbench which is a very very good so thought i might use it while i can

i have a lot of projects also but luckily for me my main project for the year is to design and make the wiring loom for a bike engined sports car which we are building so could be worse

I have to do the chassis design for our car this year, should be great fun.

Think carefully about how you are going to draw the chassis if you want to do stress analysis, if you drawi ti as serpeate parts (as I have) you may find your analysis wont mean much.

I can get solidworks free through the university, liscenced for 150days through their liscence, as long as i am still a student at the end of the 150 days, it automatically gets renewed. Pretty good.

David

I work in solid edge. Doing a motorsport engineering degree down in good old herts. How long did the chassis take you to draw? I started doing things like uprights and got a bit bored so then they got simplified etc, to the point where i may as well start again.. oops

never used solid works is it very good?

im going to do one model for the visuals and to print plans off, than if i can be bothered i'll draw another model to stress analyse, ansys is so good it couls prob cope with a full model but it would be too much bother to check i've done it correctly so i'll keep it simple

Jon:
The chassis took me about 6 weeks of evenings to draw up. But if i did it now it would probably take me half that time because i learnt a lot when i was drawing it. I did simplified cortina uprights, only for the geometry, other than that that are of no use.

Matt:
Solidworks is very good, and is very similar to inventor ina lot of repects, with bolt ons for stress analysis etc. Solidworks does have a handy feature called weldments though, which is great for drawing chassis, as it trims tubes to fit where they inetersect. All handy stuff.

David

i hope i cam get it done quicker than six weeks but knowing me it'll take far longer, inventor has weldment feature i just got to learn it now, cost me an arm and a leg to upgrade computer to run it so i've got to get most out of it,

had look at your site, you say your using a sierra doner, are you using the gts chassis, im tempted towards this but to use a motorcycel engine in it,

where did you get the info of your site from here or just gleaned of internet?

Most of the info on my site has either come from here (so some of it is quite opinionated) and some has come from many other sources on the net.

I will be using the GTS chassis yes, as I now have somewhere to build I may actually get one soon! The GTS chassis is designed around the sierra donor, but Darren also does chassis for bike engines as well. The best thing to do is to give him a call when you are ready to talk about the options.

David