That’s terrific! Thanks for sharing.
I’ve drawn an example of this fixing, using a mixture of 3D fixing plate, and an edited version of the image from the Hafele website. I guess from the product number C100 B 24/10 that it is 24mm high, and 10mm diam for the middle portion.
I edited the image first to make the background transparent (using Preview on Mac, or another image editor on Windows).
Then I cropped out the middle portion of the image, as it looks wrong in a 3D view, leaving just the post above the fixing plane, and the thread below it, but omitting the plate.
I drew a fixing plate in SU, as a circle 10mm diam with just 12 sides, clipped off two parts of the circle to approximate the flat on the fixing plate, push pulled it 0.5mm high. and made it into a component.
Then I drew a second circle, at 8mm diam, to represent the bottom of the pillar, on top of the fixing plate, and two other circles 2.5mm and 5mm diam, to represent the pillar in plan view, and assigned them to a Plan view layer (which you can turn ON when in a scene in plan view).
I drew a rectangle 24mm high and 12 mm wide, in the Red/Blue plane, then hid its edges, and reversed the face so it is toward you. I then imported As Texture the PNG image of the fixing onto the face. I centred the image on the face, and then centred the face on the origin. With the camera in Front view, I made the face and image into a Face Me component, choosing its axes on the vertical centreline, and just above the bottom of the (image of) the pillar.
Then Select All in the drawing, make the whole thing a component, Glue to Any, Cut Opening, and set component axes at the origin.
Save As component, and it was done. Including fiddling about with the image, and several experiments to see how the image would look in 3D. Took overall about an hour, more or less (I wasn’t timing it).
Here’s the result.
Hafele Minifix C100 B24_10.skp (108.0 KB)
And here was the edited image:
And here’s what it looks like in several different orientations.
In SU itself, just as a component:
And inserted into boards:
I’ve also redrawn a very much simplified matching housing.
The Autocad 3D drawing imported from the Hafele site is 156KB in SU.
The imported component seems to me quite uselessly complex for any purpose I can think of, as a subcomponent in someone else’s assembly drawing. Almost 2500 edges, and 300 faces, made into a group then wrapped in a component. And it isn’t even a solid!
To make my simplified version, I first drew a simple cylinder, 15mm D x 13mm H, and put the image of the top, from the Hafele site, onto the top face.
I scaled everything up by a factor of 100, then I created a very much simplified hollowed out interior, by drawing an oval (rectangle plus end semicircle arcs), pushpulling it to a solid and making it into a component, then subtracting that from the cylinder. Then I further subtracted a rectangular solid from the result. And then scaled it back down to full size. Without the scaling, the small faces and edges don’t subtract properly.
It isn’t perfect, but to my mind it would serve your purposes much better than even a poly-reduced version of the Hafele drawing.
See what you think of the simplified alternative below - good enough for an assembly drawing?
Here’s my SKP version of the housing:
Minifix housing 15mm.skp (71.7 KB)
Just 197 edges and 69 faces. And you could reduce those numbers further if you redrew the cylinder and oval cutout with fewer sides - say 16 instead of 24 which I used (the SU default).
And here’s what it looks like, again from a variety of angles.
If you want the markings on the top to come out bolder, you could draw them as SU lines on the face at the top of the housing. Or if you are more of a perfectionist, you could cut out the Pozidrive screw socket in 3D (as I did for my woodscrews).
I could imagine that the Draw Metal plugins might be quite useful for working on little gubbins like these…especially those helical, tightener thingies. I’m just not sure that you need that much detail.
http://www.drawmetal.com/