I'm in a SolidWorks class and I'm really enjoying it. It's really slow cause it's only a 1 credit course but I've looked up walkthroughs on how to make some stuff.
Started with the N64 cube and that was really awesome (trying to get it 3D printed atm)

Then I made a tire.

My dream car is a 67 Mustang Fastback GT (390 cu in).

My end goal is to model the entire car. I'm really not sure how far I am gonna be able to get because contours look rough, as well as creating the car and all of it's parts from the ground up.

My question is.....
I looked up the dimensions of the wheel. 14x6 inches. Does this measure to the outermost rim or the inner rim?

Then for the actual tire I hear there is some kind of formula for the right fit? Or will this be a Mustang spec somewhere?

This post was edited by MachoMonkey89 on Oct 11 2013 02:22pm

There are two different rim widths. One measures inside bead to inside bead. The other measures the entire width lip to lip. Height is overall height outside to outside.


there are several tire sizes that will fit any given wheel size. You need to look up the oem tire size for that year model.

Thank you.

Standard tire size:
F70 - 14

Tire width (mm):
211

Tire sidewall factor:
70

Rim size (in):
14

Total wheel diameter (mm / in):
651 / 25.6

Which would be what? Or which are missing?

And is there any way to get the dimensions for the treads as well?

e/ ok lol there is only the rim size there and the rest are for the tires (which is also useful, but not exactly what I was looking for. I'll try to find more info)

This post was edited by MachoMonkey89 on Oct 11 2013 02:41pm

What are you in school for and where if you dont mind me asking?
Im an engineer and I use solidworks daily (not that Im great at it or anything).
Modeling a lot of parts is as simple as just drawing out the shape but the curvature of the sheet metal will be a good bit harder.
What you can do is find a way to measure points along the surface you want to model and put them into excel or something as X, Y, Z coordinates. You can then take those coordinates and generate a mesh that connects them and gives you the surface. Ive never done it with solidworks but I did do it in NX when I was in school. Its not hard to generate a surface if you have the points, but getting good measurements isnt easy without a CMM.

I mainly do sheetmetal forming where I work so almost everything is flat surfaces like boxes but if you have any questions about solidworks I can try to help.

Also, if you plan on modeling ALL of the parts to the car you will need a pretty good computer.

This post was edited by AXIS on Oct 11 2013 04:12pm

Mechanical Engineering in New Jersey.

And yeah I think it will just take some time, I don't actually have the software on my computer so whenever I have free time and am near the lab I'll hop on and do some stuff. The piece of shit Dells they have in the labs are God awful. Intel Core Duo 2 processors... And Solidworks can be really slow starting up and is known to crash with larger files. We use 2010 for the class but the computers do have the most recent license (2013?) Would you suggest I use this?

And the body work would probably come much later. I would want to work on the engin3 bay (never understood why you can't actually say it) and it's components first I think. This would really teach me everything that works together to make a car run, which is also something I'd love to learn.

Not sure how much a student license would cost but I know MATLAB was around 100 bucks for the 4 years. I have a second gen i7, with GT 630M graphics on my laptop. It can actually play DayZ (a mod in Arma II) extremely well on ultra, just it runs really hot.

I think we have solidworks 14 available where I work now but I want to say im still on 13. I dont know how much of it is new so I cant really speak for 10.
One thing that will really be nice for you is learning to use Autodesk Inventor. Its pretty much the same thing as Solidworks with a little different layout but you can download a student version for free and keep it for like 4 years after you graduate.
All you need is a student email address I believe. Check their website, we used Inventor at Georgia Tech.

Also I think I only paid like $40 for Matlab, but I dont recall.

While modeling a car would be neat, I would start with something a little easier. One of my projects in school was a mountain bike. A lot of it was simple but there is also stuff like the chain and gearing that gets more involved.

And when you type "engine" "bay" it sees e-bay and filters it

Not a bad idea. With me being a beginner it would probably take me so long that I would lose interest as well. I may do the mountain bike idea.

And thanks for the suggestion I'll check out Autodesk.

Helpful tire/rim size calculator ▬ http://www.rimsntires.com/specs.jsp

If you want a good "car model guy" I can't recommend anyone other than squir. He is the master. www.squir.com

I suggest using 3ds max, maya, or blender to model a car. Solidworks is not very friendly when it comes to complex surface sweeps/lofts because it requires constrained curves and each change you make requires a complete model rebuild.

Good to know. But I think the whole point was to do it in Solidworks to master the program. But honestly it wouldn't be too bad of an idea to branch out and learn more programs just to put on my resume. Because I do enjoy it and can't stand this insanely slow pace this 1 credit course has...

2014 Autodesk Inventor just finished installing... All 18.3 gigs of it and all 6 Desktop shortcuts. Let's hope it doesn't completely shit on my laptop.

Oh and those programs you listed, any free? Cause this is really just for my own interest/benefit. Not required.

e/ wow this program is so streamlined. I can't believe how much better it is already. And I can open any file and save a sketch as any file. I think that means I can do my homework from home instead of going to the lab that's 30 mins away that has Solidworks installed!!!

This post was edited by MachoMonkey89 on Oct 12 2013 11:17pm

Just a warning sharing files between solidworks and inventor is a pain. About all you can do is save it as a STEP file and hope it imports well

Ive ran Inventor on my 2010 macbook pro just fine and its the low end model.