Hello Everyone at the Forum. I looked at my large skp file (260mb) and decided maybe I could split it apart into a series of drawings, each drawing staying under the 50mb limit so I could send them to the Warehouse. I was able to do that. It took 19 separate drawing files. They are all at the Warehouse, my Warehouse general collection name is: Pistonrobot and the Collection these are in is called: Ventilator
Here’s the url: Ventilator | 3D Warehouse
My original ventilator drawings were really large and took a long time for Sketchup to be able to do anything with them. I created a tiny little ball bearing and there are 6 little spheres in each ball bearing. I thought for sure this group of 6 little spheres would be the cause of the Sketchup filesize blowup and processing speed slow down issues. There’s a bunch of these ball bearings in the drawings. Based on this hunch, I went through some drawing files, navigated down to each ball bearing, and I took out the little spheres in all the ball bearings in the drawing, but…alas…no help. So, I looked around some more.
Of interest, I wanted to have a number 4 size socket head bolt with accompanying number 4 size nylon insert locking nut. I put these in to show size and to demonstrate that it is possible to make an item held together with bolts and lock nuts, even though that #4 bolt and nut are not very big. I thought I would try to add some threads just because it looks so much better. I didn’t add threads with an actual spiral because that is really hard to do and chews up a bunch of space and processing time. I thought I could make a thread that doesn’t spiral but it looks good and, unless you really study it, you wouldn’t notice that the threads don’t sprial. But, whew!, did that little bolt goof up how big my drawings were and how slow they made Sketchup go. So I went through and created another bolt that was plain, flat, and ugly, but that bolt made Sketchup happy. Anyway, there’s some fun stuff to look at in these Ventilator models, if you like mechanical models. I plan a YouTube discussing how this ventilator will work, but I’ve got to get the pumping mechanism drawn out first. Of note, my ventilator drawings are all made at an increased size. I did this by using the scale tool to uniformly increase the group size by a factor of 10. The reason for this is that Sketchup does not like doing operations on solids that are small items, so if everything is at x10 or x100 size, then Sketchup stays happy. Just remember if you wish to know the size of an item on the real version of this proposed ventilator, whatever you measure on my ventilator drawings, to get the size of that item on the real version, you need to shrink the measurement value from my drawing by a factor of 10.
Enjoy, Dr. Gray (I’ve attached a 2-D jpg export of that bolt with its pretty threads peeking out, there’s also a ball bearing showing. I didn’t attach a copy of the ugly bolt that I had to substitute in…it’s just too plain…boring, oh well)
