card guide...

[mardy]

I'm in the process of creating a 3-D mechanical drawing of the original card guide. When it is completed, I will post the DXF file.

Anybody out there have the resources to make a mold?

-Mardy

[geneb]

Yep.

I was hoping to trade a kit for my services as I don't have the money for a kit, but I _really_ want one.

g.

[mardy]

Here is a replica design that I put together. The DXF and IGES files for the design can be found at the following URL:

http://web.mac.com/mardy/iWeb/Altair/CardGuide.dxf
http://web.mac.com/mardy/iWeb/Altair/CardGuide.igs

[geneb]

That looks really nice Mardy. Unfortunately it doesn't render at all when I import it into Inventor 10.

Can you try saving it as a DWG file? Any version of AutoCAD from 2004 and prior I can read in Inventor.

tnx!

g.

[Grant Stockly]

Thats nice. Did you use Cobalt?

Since you did the drawing, I wonder how cheap the tooling would be... The price I got was if they had to reverse engineer my part.

[mardy]

Unfortunately I think that machining the mold is still the hard part. But then, having never done one before, I could be wrong.

I drew this with a simple Mac CAD package called TurboCAD. They also make Windows versions. It's very inexpensive. After the $40.00 mail-in rebate, it cost me $60.00. It's not SolidWorks, but it also costs a fraction of the price.

Gene, I re-exported the DXF file so that it is now AutoCad 2004 format. Hopefully you can import either that or the IGES version.

-Mardy

[geneb]

Marty, no go on either one. The IGES version comes in really weird to Inventor and when I load the dxf into AutoCAD all it shows is a single circle. It's kind of strange.

g.