Drawing a scroll in SW

[BanduraMaker]

Hi all,

I'm new to the CNC world but a bit more familiar with CAD but honestly, I'm a rank amateur when it comes to complex 3D surfaces.

I'm Trying to model a neck for an instrument I build in SolidWorks. Unfortunately, the latest version I have is SW99 but that's all I can't justify an upgrade at the moment so that's what I'm stuck with.

Anyhow, I had some time today to work on it and while I had some success, I'm also having giant failures as well.

I've included a couple pictures of a hand carved scroll I made that I'm trying to model.

I'm having trouble mirroring a feature to create a symmetrical scroll. This is also giving me fits as to how I'm going to manage to create all the hollows in this thing.

Any advice on how to proceed?

Also, I'm located in SE Michigan, if anyone's willing to take on a novice, I'd greatly appreciate it.

[Jagrolet]

Could you just make half of it as a single part, then make an assembly and mate the same part to it on the opposite side?

[BanduraMaker]

Heh...figured it out - I used mirror all instead of mirror feature and it worked!

Oddly, I'm having display issues with SW99 that aren't really there. The center cylinder isn't displaying. I exported to IGES and imported to Alibre and the surfaces were there, they're just not showing in solidworks.

This is going to take forever!

[BanduraMaker]

As I'm refining the shape, I'm having more rendering issues. The center cylinder I originally did by extruding a circle. That stopped working giving me a failure to merge surfaces or something and I had to replace it with a revolved rectangle.

Again after importing to Alibre, everything looked ok. Any ideas?

[giz]

My guess is that you have an unsupported graphics card.

Not sure if SW99 has this option, but newer versions allow you to "Use Software OpenGL" (Tools > Options > System Options > Performance) which completely bypasses the graphics card. If this fixes the problem you know it is graphics related (hardware or driver issue). This is intended as a diagnostic tool, but it can be used as a bandaid if needed. You'll see decreased performance though.