A grooved hoisting drum from around 1880 perhaps used in a mine. About 28 in. dia.
This was an exercise in excess. 
On the bright side, both components are solid. Would anyone like to 3D print about 200 feet of wire rope? 
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I would be very interested (and appreciative) in seeing a break down of how you made this. Was this measured directly from the real thing or from construction drawings? Awesome work!
Thanks. This was modeled based on dimensioned drawings i found in an ancient old book from about 1880. Maybe I’ll work up some sort of tutorial showing how I went about it.
Let’s see if these screen shots will give you an idea.
The basic set up.
Key thing in doing this: Work around the origin. That gives you an easy, fixed reference point.
The green is the section profile of the drum. Blue circle is the Follow Me path for the drum. The gray shapes will become the cutters for the holes through the ends of the drum.
After Follow Me, make the drum a component and ensure it is solid.
Extrude the cutter shapes and roate copy to make the rest of them. Select all of the geometry for the cutters and make another component ensuring it reports as solid in Entity Info.
Use Trim from Eneroth Solid Tools or from Bool Tools 2 to create the openings in the drum. I use Trim instead of Subtract because I want to be in charge of when the cutter component is deleted. I also prefer the listed extensions over the native Solid Tools because they respect the component thing.
For this demo I omitted the webs on the inside of the spokes but they were created essentially like the cutters but then they were added to the drum instead of being trimmed. It would have been possible to make the webs by making the ends of the drum thicker and then creating a trimming cutter to remove all but the webs.
For the cable groove I started with a helix drawn with Curve Maker and a circle for the cable cross section.
I ran Upright Extruder and then copied the geometry enough times to get all the turns needed. You could create a helix with all the required turns but I think it’s faster to make a shorter section and copy it rather than waiting for Upright Extruder to complete. Make the cable extrusion a component and ensure it is solid. Rotate it 90° and make sure it is properly positioned along the drum.
Then use Trim from Eneroth Solid Tools or Bool Tools 2 to cut the groove in the drum. In my model, due to the huge number of entities it took quite awhile for this final Trim operation to complete so I went and did some other stuff while I waited.
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Thanks very much for sharing this Dave, it’s great to get a insight into how to go about modelling something like this. Setting out seems to be the most vital element, SketchUp/extensions do the rest!
Much appreciated
Matt
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I reckon you easily have plenty of knowledge and techniques to write a very comprehensive book.
You always explain methods in a very clear and concise way.
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Thank you very much, sir.
@DaveR, Beautifully done!
Thank you for the detailed modeling method as well, ditto @MichaelSiggers .
One question, what method did you use to create the section hatching?
Thanks.
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Thank you sir.
I used TIG’s Section Cut Face plugin to generate a face and then used one of the sketchy patterns from the native materials for the hatching.
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You are very welcome.
Great to learn. I will give a try.
Thanks and Best.
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