Welcome
Welcome to A very Swell Idea, Inc.
We are a CAD services and product development company.
Before you move on because you think you don’t need “CAD Services”, please explore our site to learn more about how we can help you. You may be pleasantly surprised at the unique range of our expertise. We are adding new content every day, so check back again soon.
Have a very swell day!
Customer Use Drawings
It happens at every manufacturing facility I’ve come across. A customer or potential customer calls up and wants an engineering drawing of some part of a larger assembly so they can design their equipment to interface with it. The general assembly drawing you’ve created specifically for customers isn’t detailed enough. The catalog only shows a picture of the part in question. Their application is something you’ve never encountered before (if they will even describe it to you) and now you’ve got a decision to make.
Company policy states, “Thou shalt not send proprietary engineering data to anyone outside the company.” This is, of course, for good reason as your engineering design data is what differentiates you from every other competitor, it’s who you are, it’s your life blood and deserves protection at all costs (within reason). Enforce the policy and you upset the customer or worse yet, lose the sale. Send them the production drawing and you slowly erode the value of your intellectual property and run the risk of your competitor or customer stealing your design. Non Disclosure Agreements (NDA’s) can help, but they are a pain because you have to get lawyers involved and they’re difficult to manage. Some customers just will not sign them – what can you do?
The solution: Customer Use Drawings. Customer Use (CU) drawings are just what they sound like, a drawing made for a customer to use. They are different from production drawings that contain every detail needed to manufacture something. The information they offer is sufficient for the customer to make proper use of your product in their application. The level of detail will vary widely, but you can always expect a CU drawing to have less detail than a production drawing.
Companies handle CU drawings in different ways. Some will assign a completely different drawing number to a drawing that is designated for customer use. This can be challenging if you do not have an efficient way to link CU numbers to production numbers. Initial drawing creation is fairly simple as you can just take the production drawing and do a Save As to the new number. Then add, delete or change the drawing for customer use and you’re done. As you can see, one major limitation of this method is that now the production drawing and the CU drawing are no longer linked to each other. They might be driven by the same part or assembly so major design changes will carry through, but they will now have independent revision histories. The engineer/designer assigned to make changes at some future date needs to be careful to update both drawings separately. This doesn’t always ever happen.
Another method for creating CU drawings is to use the same drawing file for both. With this method, everything comes from one file so updates are simple. New drawing numbers do not need to be created and managed, making the search for the CU drawing the same as the search for the production version. Drawing creation is even easier than a Save As because you don’t need to delete anything. The only drawback that I can see is that if you revise a production part from A to B and change a feature that doesn’t show up on the CU drawing, you may still want to output a revised CU drawing to be consistent. I recommend hiding the revision history on a CU drawing so this change may be nothing more than renaming the file (if you have the revision level 
in the filename). Having a different drawing number for the CU drawing enables independent revision histories. Most cases for the application of CU drawings, however, involve special one-time circumstances where a customer is asking for something out of the ordinary like the dimensions of the “small thermal exhaust port right below the main port”. A typical configuration drawing of the entire assembly would never include such inconsequential dimensions as no customer would need them (except yours). A CU drawing could be quickly made of just the “exhaust port” so the customer could be sure their “product” will fit inside. These cases are usually one-time requests that vary from customer to customer making separate revision histories unnecessary.
The tool that makes it possible to create production drawings and CU drawings from the same file is Layers. If you have a 2D CAD background like I do, you have probably worked with layers before. At WDI, like most firms that design products that fit inside buildings, we would design an entire themed attraction in one 2D drawing file using a different layer for every discipline. Each drawing sheet would have only certain layers showing and all the others hidden. In the 3D realm, this seems foreign to some, but the old rules still apply and layers make CU drawings possible.
In SolidWorks, the first thing you might consider is to turn on the Layer toolbar.
This gives you easy access to all of the layers and the button that brings up the Layers dialog box. Things you can control with the Layers dialog box include layer name and description, layer visibility (on/off), object color, object linetype style and object linetype thickness.
By default, SolidWorks places all objects on a special layer called –None-. This layer is special because it doesn’t really exist. It cannot be turned off nor changed. I mention it as if it were a real layer because it can be selected from the Layer toolbar when you are choosing what layer to place an object on. Placing an object on the –None- layer makes it always visible.
I created a few standard layers in my drawing templates. First, a layer called NOSHOW which is a dumping ground for important information that may be needed to make a drawing but you don’t want to show when creating output. Currently on the NOSHOW layer are dimensions used to define the titleblock. SolidWorks lets you hide things at will but it’s not always easy to unhide them if you do not know they are there. The NOSHOW layer makes it easy to see what’s there but meant not to be shown.
In addition, a layer called FORMAT where I put the drawing format (titleblock, border, etc.) enables me to turn off the sheet format when I want to print a copy of the drawing with just the drawing views and no titleblock. Having a titleblock implies officiality, completeness, design verification, drawing checks and approvals, assigned part numbers, etc. No titleblock implies a quick sketch, a negotiable design, a work in progress, not complete nor official, open to discussion, etc. There is a time and a place for both making the FORMAT layer a valuable tool.
The other two layers I created are CUSTOMER USE and NOT FOR CUSTOMER. Placing data on these layers and turning the appropriate layer on or off makes creating CU drawings a reality. To create a CU drawing from a production drawing, simply select the items that are not for customer (CTRL-Click to select multiple items) and place them on the NOT FOR CUSTOMER layer by selecting the layer in the toolbar. Turn off that layer by launching the Layers dialog box and clicking the light bulb icon beside it and click OK. Change your current layer from -None- to CUSTOMER USE by selecting it from the pop-up list in the toolbar. Add any details that are customer specific including a note that says CUSTOMER USE DRAWING. Any items left on the –None- layer will show up on both the CU drawing and the production drawing.
By hiding the CUSTOMER USE layer and showing the NOT FOR CUSTOMER layer, you can see what the production drawing will look like. I usually place some text on the NOT FOR CUSTOMER layer somewhere outside the printable area that says, “THE ANNOTATIONS ON THIS LAYER ARE NOT FOR CUSTOMER USE”. This helps the user to know what layers are turned on or off.
The final step is output. It is always a good practice to save engineering documentation in a neutral file format, preferably one that is difficult to edit. Many companies use PDF files for their released documents. The Save As tool in SolidWorks includes a PDF option, making creating PDF’s easy. I typically recommend using a filename that captures the moment in time for the file. For example, a drawing 84848.slddrw could be saved as 84848.pdf but the next time it is revised, a new PDF would overwrite the old. How would you know what version of the file you had? Saving it as 84848 Rev A.pdf creates a snapshot in time at Rev A for this drawing. A revised drawing would become 84848 Rev B.pdf thus preserving the older version. If your revision system doesn’t include revision tracking, you might use the date instead, as in 84848 07Jul10.pdf. For a Customer Use drawing, I recommend app
ending CU to the end of the filename so they sort next to each other in your file system (e.g. 84848 Rev A CU.pdf). Adding “CU” to the end makes it clear what the file is intended for.
My drawing templates are setup to include both the CUSTOMER USE and the NOT FOR CUSTOMER layers but they are both turned off. All drawing is done on the –None- layer. The CU features lie dormant until I get that call for some obscure question about the size of my exhaust port compared to the size of a womp rat. Since I’ve never seen a womp rat and I’m not sure what the customer really needs, I send them a CU drawing of the exhaust port and everybody is happy (for now).
For your convenience I’ve created a detailed printable tutorial that you can download here: AVSITUT-0017 CustomerUseDrawings Rev A.
SolidWorks 2010 files for this tutorial can be downloaded here: CustomerUseDrawings.
Update: Special thanks to GabiJack.com for the idea of placing a downloadable pdf tutorial at the end of this post. Her tutorial on Modeling a pair of scissors is an excellent example.
Branding The Ball – Going Online
I’ve read various articles in the last few years touting the importance of having a “web presence”. One online marketing expert suggests that all of your marketing efforts point your customers first to your website. There they should be able to easily learn all about you and your products in a self-serve fashion. Educate your customers before they call you and you will be more efficient with your marketing efforts. In fact, they may not even need to call you. My experience is that every company uses the web in a different way and I have yet to close a sale without a few phone conversations (and often a face-to-face visit). God made us to need each other (remember the Love your Neighbor command?) and most people just like to talk to other people.
That being said, a website is an easy way to get the ball rolling when it comes to communicating with people, assuming your target audience is “online”. Since the product I am trying to market is really nothing more than a story (How to Make a BoogerBall), and my target audience is curious people like you, I really need a dedicated website to make it available to the public. As a product development consultant, I’ve developed a few websites in my career (printncut.com, daleblanshan.com, samuelschutz.com, jasondionne.com, larishconstruction.com, mattwhit.com, etc.). Most of my potential customers know they want a website but don’t always know what’s involved to have one, so here’s a bit of info about actually owning a website.
Some background first: The Internet is nothing more than thousands of computers all over the world all connected to each other in one big network. A website is nothing more than a small clump of files stored on one of those “web server” computers. When someone types your website address into their browser, their computer sends out a request into the Internet. The first stop is a Domain Name Server which has a list of all of the domain names (www.averyswellidea.com is a domain name) and the actual address of the computer where the website files are stored (67.202.70.14 is its IP address). Then the request gets bounced all around the world until the correct location of your website files is found. The files requested are then broken up into little chunks and sent back through the network to their computer where the chunks are reassembled and organized for viewing by the browser. It sounds complex, but the process happens millions of times a day and is actually very efficient.
With that background in mind, there are three points of investment involved in owning a website. The first is the purchase of a domain name. This is usually an annual fee situation where you pay to reserve and use the name you want for your website. There are many companies that sell domain names, Network Solutions being the most well known. I use a service called NamesDirect.com because I happened to buy my first domain name from them several years ago. I’ve been pleased with their service so I’m still a loyal customer. I did a domain name search and found BoogerBall.com was available. So, I purchased BoogerBall.com, BoogerBall.net and BoogerBall.org. Buying the 3 most common names assures me that if I pursue using the Internet to market this product, there will not be a competitor that will use the same name to hinder my marketing activities. I recommend this strategy to all of my customers as the cost is minimal, but having the name secured can be priceless.
The second point of investment in the process of owning a website is web server hosting. You need to rent some space on one of the thousands of web server computers out there. This is usually a monthly fee commitment that varies widely depending upon all of the features you need. Of course, if you plan to have a big, security intensive website, or if you don’t play nice with others, you will probably want your own server. BoogerBall.com will probably never need its own server. I rent space from Steadfast Networks which has proven to be an excellent host and has made it so I can host sites for my customers (all of the sites mentioned above are hosted by my company).
The third point of investment for owning a website is in the actual design and maintenance of the site. This can be a one-time, flat fee or a perpetual monthly expense. It all depends upon your level of expertise, the complexity of what you need and what you are willing to pay. I’m not an expert but I have learned that for my customers, creating a blog website powered by WordPress has been the best balance of cost versus capability versus self maintainability. I can build it and they can maintain it, both with relative ease and aesthetic excellence. You will notice that most of the sites listed above are powered by WordPress. That is how the latest version of averyswellidea.com was developed. So BoogerBall.com will become a WordPress blog site and that is a story for a future post. -Amos
New 80/20 Weldment Profiles
On April 15th I received an email from 80/20, Inc. announcing new smooth profiles. I have always believed the sole purpose of the grooves that adorn most 80/20 extrusion profiles was to differentiate their product from others in the marketplace. I have tremendous respect for 80/20, not only because I love their product, but because their service is excellent. You truly get what you pay for and their fast, efficient service has helped me meet many deadlines on time with a superior quality product. Most of my customers do not mind the grooved profiles so I’ve had no need to try other company’s products.
In the design phase, however, the grooved profiles drive me crazy. I use SolidWorks to design my frames because the weldment tools make it so easy. But, when you make a drawing of an 80/20 frame, it looks like a big blob of thick black ink spilled all over your page. Every one of those grooves creates 2 lines and the standard single-width profile has 4 grooves per side. A view which would normally have a few lines per stick of 80/20 has many. What a mess this makes if your views are small because your frame is large (and who makes a 1:1 scale drawing of something as simple as an 80/20 frame?).
Smooth profiles to the rescue. Thank you 80/20. I just completed a design for 3 new frames and they are going to look so nice with the new smooth profiles. In addition to the improvement on the drawings, working with these in 3D is also much improved. The big black blob thing is also a problem in 3D but more importantly, it is much easier to mate other parts to your 80/20 frame because you do not need to zoom in so far to pick the correct face to mate to. All of those grooves always had a vertigo effect on me forcing me to pan/zoom/rotate my model to reorient myself. The smooth profiles are much better.
But wait, there’s more! The title of this post implies more to be discussed. So, here it is: I downloaded all of 80/20′s new profiles from their website and did some work to convert all of them to SolidWorks 2010 weldment profile library features. They are all available for individual download at 3DContentCentral. Also, for your convenience, they are all here in one chubby zip file. Place them in your weldment profile directory and you should be able to enjoy all of the benefits of smooth profile frame creation that I’ve mentioned above. Special thanks to Van Graves who provided quality control on these. I finished them late last night but had to fix them all this morning after he pointed out some missing critical features. Working as a team is always better than going it alone. -Amos
SmoothProfiles (3MB)
Update: if you’re looking for all of 80/20′s old profiles (the groovy style or the metric products), I’ve already made those available here.
Branding the Ball – The Name
The average American consumer is exposed to about 245 pieces of promotional media on any single day. (1) I believe this has resulted in gradually shorter attention spans and an increasing low tolerance for uninteresting advertisements. For this reason, advertising media that once only touted a product’s features now focuses more on entertaining the viewer. Beyond traditional advertising, branding has become a popular technique in marketing a product.
What is “branding”? Branding is more than a catchy name, an easily recognized logo and a cool tag line. Branding is the entire persona of a product. Color, sound, smell, other product association, user demographic, market placement, event sponsorship, etc. etc. It’s the whole package. It’s the clothes you wear, the accent in your voice, your cologne, the church you attend, the friends you keep, the places you eat, the car you drive and what brand of facial tissue you blow your nose with. So, if I were interested in marketing my booger ball product, how would I go about “branding the ball”?
The first thing to consider when developing a product into a brand is its name. Names have always been important for me. One of my customers had me working on a new machine that was to be their flagship product of the future. It was going to include all of the key features of the successful products of their past at half the cost. It was going to trump the competition. The name they chose was “Model TBD”. Now, I understand that the design phase is still early in the product development process, but a product this big deserved a name. I couldn’t stand working on the project. Nobody wanted to take responsibility for naming it, so I did. We called the project the Lancer. It wasn’t the greatest name, but it did inspire some of the true vision of what the product was to become. It was much better than TBD (to be determined). Eventually the marketing department named the product something different, but at least it had a “code” name to help inspire us.
Every project/product I work on needs to have a name so I am always coming up with names for products. A good product name should describe the product. It should be easy to say and spell (most important today in the internet age where address is everything). The name also needs to fit the overall theme of your product (e.g. a sophisticated product needs to have a sophisticated sounding name). When working on a name, I usually search available domain names (website names) that I might use to market the product. I also search the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) to see if the name has been registered as a trademark. I do an internet search to see what else is out there in cyberspace. I share the name with some of my friends and family to see what they think of it (in business, this is called a “focus group”). I also say a prayer because I realize that my creativity comes from God who made me and He inspires me to come up with clever names. All of these activities put together usually results in a suitable name for my project/product.
As it turns out, my story about how to make a booger ball, naturally leads to its own name. The term “booger ball” is self descriptive. A search on the USPTO site reveals only 2 registered trade marks including the words booger and ball and they are both expired. A domain name search reveals boogerball.com is available. The last thing that makes sense for this name is to combine the words booger and ball together into one word. The website name does that naturally, but having a unique word (even if it is a combination of two common words) makes it easier to protect the name. So from now on, I will call my product the BoogerBall. Everywhere I need to talk about a ball of boogers, I will use the new word BoogerBall. This is swell because the two words alone are nouns but together they can be used as an adjective. A BoogerBall box is a box used to hold a ball fabricated from rubber cement. Capitalizing the two B’s hearkens back to my computer programming experience where I designed numerous database solutions for small companies and all of the field names were descriptive but mashed together with caps to make sense of them.
As I said before, branding is much more than just a name. Now that we have established the name, we can focus on the many remaining facets of branding. More to come… -Amos
Spirograph Design for CSWP Contest
I’m going SolidWorks World next week and I’ve been told that the CSWP event on Monday night should be a good time. I remember seeing details about last year’s event where everyone got to play with the iCoaster. It looked cool. This year everyone gets to test drive an RC car. I’m not very good with RC cars, but there’s a design contest too. That’s something I can do.
The Problem: design a new wheel in SolidWorks for the SC10 RC car.
The Rules: Points will be awarded in these key areas: 1) Is the wheel designed and supplied in SolidWorks format? 2) Is the wheel rendered and/or animated in a cool way? 3) Is the wheel construction feasible? (decided by Team Associated engineers/designers)
The rules seem a bit awkward to me – the company obviously wants some free design work, but I want to have some fun. My best designs come when I ignore the Rules and just get creative (notice I said “ignore” and not “forget” – eventually you need to come back to the rules, but if you can ignore them for awhile, your creativity will not be limited.)
My wife still has her childhood Spirograph!
The first idea that comes to mind is an old toy – the Spirograph. What if my RC car wheel had spokes that looped around in a continuous weave that looked like one of those designs you can make with a Spirograph?
There must be a mathematical equation to describe the path made when a point on one circle is plotted as it rotates around another circle. If I can plot the path mathematically, maybe I can create a 3D path in SolidWorks to describe a sweep for the spokes of my wheel. After searching for “spirograph equation”, I discovered David Little’s page at Penn State University. As it turns out, the path of a Spirograph is called an epicycloid. It’s described by a pair of equations:
x(t)=(R+r)cos(t) + p*cos((R+r)t/r)
y(t)=(R+r)sin(t) + p*sin((R+r)t/r)
R and r are the radii of the 2 circles, p is the position along the radius of the first circle (the hole you put your pencil in on a Spirograph). Mr Little’s website has a cool Java applet that draws epicycloids based upon your input. If you experiment with this tool, you can discover all sorts of interesting geometry. After a few iterations, I found a combination that I thought might look like the spokes of a wheel using the values R=72, r=66 and p=67.
Where would engineers be without the spreadsheet? I remember seeing a documentary on PBS called Nerds where I learned that the first spreadsheet was called Visicalc and it was for accountants. Excel is the tool that I am most familiar with – version 2003 being most preferred. The Excel version of these formulas seems a bit more complicated. First, cells are made for all of the constants (R, r, p). I added a few extra for scaling – the final goal is an equation of a curve that will intersect the hub and rim of our wheel. Examination of the formula quickly reveals that t is an angular variable. I made a column for t in degrees because I know this is a cyclical function that will repeat every 360º (remember, it’s a circle rotating around a circle). I also made a column for radians (degrees times pi divided by 180) because Excel evaluates sine and cosine in radians. I probably could change this default somewhere, but that is something I would probably forget later and it’s easy to remember how to convert degrees to radians.
I know I want X and Y coordinates for the entire path and that they will eventually return to zero. I wasn’t sure how to know how many points to plot so I made some check formulas that subtract the current X and Y values from the original X and Y values – when the check columns both hit zero, I know I’ve returned home. The last step for X and Y is to plot a curve using Excel’s graph tool. The Excel graph matches the epicycloid plot so I know I’m on the right track. (Actually, I’m thoroughly appreciating the same feature that the original users of Visicalc appreciated, Excel’s power to iterate until I get it right.)
Some interesting observations: my epicycloid has 12 loops and the equation to describe it requires 3960 points at one degree increments. If I made another with 22 loops, I would expect it to take 7560 points to describe it (360 x 21). For some reason, my check equations did not exactly return to zero until I placed a round function into my formulas – I added a variable for the number of rounded decimal places as well.
What about Z? The equations for an epicycloid are only in 2 dimensions, but I want a 3D path for my wheel spokes. The options are limitless, but a sine function would make a nice smooth equation and it would behave in a similar way as the epicycloid equations. Some constants are necessary to vary how often the equation returns to zero and vary its scale. Graphing the function over the same range gives a clue how the path will vary in Z.
Excel’s worksheet functionality makes it easy to create formatted output. It turns out that the way the wheel was originally created, I need my X and Z data points to be swapped. By creating a new worksheet with only X, Y and Z values, I can swap the values very easily. The final result is a text file with 3960 points of X, Y and Z data.
Now to SolidWorks! The Insert Curve Through XYZ Points tool quickly creates a 3D path.
As a point of interest, I believe it was because of this tool that Walt Disney Imagineering chose SolidWorks as it’s 3D design tool – they had 3D points to describe the path of a rollercoaster and needed a tool to model the track. I created a second sketch on a principal plane perpendicular to the path. I started with just a sketch point and some dimensions tieing it down to the path.
Then I made the geometry for my sweep all tied to the sketch point. This way, if I want to change the profile from a circle to a square, I don’t lose my dimensions when I delete the circle. The Sweep tool turns all this hard work into an effortless expression of mathematical beauty. A few features to tie the spokes to the wheel and I have my entry.
Of course, I must return to the rules. I already know I will not win because, although my design is interesting, it cannot be molded which is the intent of rule 3. Rule 1 is easy – SolidWorks makes the whole thing possible. So Rule 2 is the only one left to satisfy.
I’m running out of time so a quick assembly with a cut-away view and a few minutes of rendering in PhotoView 360 and, at last, I have an entry.
Here are all of the files I used to create this design. -Amos
AEA Entry 1 of 2
AEA Entry 2 of 2
Followup: SolidWorks World was great. The CSWP event was very fun even though I am a very poor RC driver. 
I did not win the design contest (for obvious reasons). I did, however, win one of 40 SC-10 RC cars, which is VERY cool!
SolidWorks World Presentation
Last week I taught a course at SolidWorks World called Nonwelded Weldments – Using SolidWorks Weldment Tools and 3DContentCentral to Create 80/20 Structures. I always enjoy teaching and this event was especially gratifying when a couple of the attendees told me that they had been designing 80/20 frames for years but had never thought to use the Weldment tools to do it. It will save them a bunch of time. I plan to show the steps here in future posts, but I thought I would post the PowerPoint and support files for those who are interested. -Amos
80/20 Weldment Profile Library Features
SolidWorks does an amazing job of making the design of frame structures very easy. I’ve given a few presentations lately about how to do this using 80/20 products as the example. As promised, here are all of the Weldment Profile Library Features I created and uploaded to 3DContentCentral. I will give step-by-step instructions in a future post. -Amos
Update: I’ve just added all of the new 80/20 smooth profiles here.
How to make a Booger Ball
Here it is, the original story. I’ve only modified it slightly since it was first written, adding the update note from my daughter. I am keeping the old page intact here as it is fun to watch the counter. This is the “product” I was talking about in the post about Product Development.
| When my daughter Ellen was four I started teasing her that I was saving all of my boogers in a big booger ball. I don’t know why I told her that except that it was fun to watch her make that “grossed-out” face that kids make when they smell something bad or see a squished cat on the road. She always begged to see it so finally I told her that she couldn’t see it now but I would give it to her for her eighteenth birthday. Well, guess what – she’s turning eighteen and I’ve got to come through with a booger ball! Here’s the basic steps to successful Booger Ball manufacturing: |
||
| 1. You’ll need rubber cement. I used four 4oz bottles from a local office store to make a ball 2” in diameter (it cost around $6-7 total for the four bottles). 2. Colored markers are used to add color to the boogers. Rubber cement dries in a nice neutral mucus color which is great. Boogers, however, are not all the same color. If you’re sick, they might be bright green or if you’re working hard in a dirty building they might be nearly black – remember that your nose is your body’s air filter protecting your lungs from the junk in the air. |
 |
|
 |
If you pick too hard or if the air is especially dry, you might find a bit of blood in your boogers. The colored markers in an assortment of colors helps to simulate the array of boogers you might accumulate over 14 years if you were really saving them. 3. A plastic tray, a plastic counter-top or a lid to a plastic tub to spread the cement on is needed also. I used two plastic lids from some storage tubs I had LEGO in. The cement comes off fairly easily but you might want to use something you are not especially attached to just in case there are some unforeseen problems in the project. |
|
| 4. Rubber cement doesn’t come out of porous surfaces so be careful not to get any on the carpet like I did. Take your time and work in an area suited for craft projects. Rubber cement is also a bit smelly and rather flammable – read the bottle and heed the warnings there. 5. Spread the cement on the plastic surface in a uniform layer that’s not too thick. I was tempted to goop it on but when I did the boogers did not turn out as well as they took much longer to dry. |
 |
|
 |
6. Allow some time to let the rubber cement to dry. I used two plastic lids so while one was drying I worked on the other. This proved especially efficient. 7. Choose your color palate from the colored markers. Think of all the boogers that you have picked over the years and remember the colors. Purple and pink may not be useful (unless you’ve snorted dry Kool-Aid – ouch!) but the shades of green and brown with the addition of red and black or gray will work great. |
|
 |
 |
|
| 8. Using the colored markers, apply thin stripes of color. I tended to use only one or two colors at a time. You will be making MANY batches of boogers so don’t worry about trying to add too much color in each batch. The rubber cement is a good natural mucus color that only needs an occasional accent from the markers. You may even make several batches without adding color as I did. |  |
|
 |
9. Start in a corner and rub the dried rubber cement with your fingers making a rolled booger. Continue rolling until the booger roll is the desired thickness. Tear the booger from the plastic surface. You may end up with a long string that can be torn into smaller pieces. Roll some of the cement into little balls. Lump pieces together into interesting shapes. | |
 |
10. MAKE BOOGERS – you’re a pro already! |
 |
| 11. Pile all of the completed boogers into one corner of your plastic surface or save them on a paper plate for later. You may choose to be truly artistic and make a booger painting. If so, I would separate the colors of boogers keeping all of the red ones in one pile with the greens and browns in other piles. |  |
|
 |
12. Start making your booger ball. These boogers stick together rather nicely without any added glue. Clump a bunch together to start the ball and continue to roll the ball in the pile until all of the boogers are stuck to it. |
|
| 13. REPEAT. |  |
|
 |
14. If you’re anxious to have a big ball without the time investment to really make a “real” one, you can start with a superball or other rubber ball. I haven’t tried this but I imagine if you coat the ball with rubber cement and let it dry, the new boogers should stick nicely and you’ll have a big fat ball of boogers in no time. | |
 |
 |
|
 |
15. You might find a cool box to put your booger ball in like I did at a craft store. If you get your ball big enough, you can use those display products designed for baseballs – that would be WAY cool. 16. Be careful – this booger ball is NOT edible! |
|
| There are some things to consider before you begin to make your booger ball: • Why in the world would anyone want to make a booger ball? • You may not score points with your significant other for taking on this craft project – no matter how creative your final creation ends up. • Kids LOVE boogers and the idea of anyone really having a booger ball fascinates them. Keep your ball a secret, saving it only for special occasions. Your grandkids/nieces/nephews will think you’re the coolest grandpa/grandma/aunt/uncle ever. • Life is too short not to make our own booger ball! • This is a messy project using harmful chemical glue products – don’t let kids get hurt. The markers will stain your fingers for a time (even though they claim to be washable). • Your fingers may become sore and a bit raw after a few hours of booger manufacturing. • Please don’t eat your boogers. So there it is; how to make a booger ball. If you enjoy this tutorial you might consider hiring me to develop one of your wacky ideas. Check out our site to see what else we do and how we can help you in the future. God gave us way too much creativity, but we’re willing to share! Send us a photo of your booger ball creation and we might add it to the Booger Ball Hall of Phlegm. Update: Ellen loved her booger ball. Here’s the note she sent me:
|
||
Product Development
Ever since I was young, I’ve had an obsession with the idea of “product development”. Every new idea I’ve had is accompanied by 10 more about how to manufacture, package, brand and market the idea. I can’t explain the obsession, it’s just what rolls out of my brain next. I’ve created products like CookieCrumbs, the Toad Stool, the KingKol and A Place In Your Heart. My biggest frustration in all this is that I cannot seem to get even one of these products successfully to market. Like everyone else, I blame lack of time and resources. This year I want to try something different. Like Captain Kirk who rewrote the Kobayashi Maru test, I’m going to redefine success. All this time, I’ve been judging my self by units sold and since I’ve sold very few units of any of my products (except maybe LolliPop Toppers™), I feel unsuccessful. One product of my design is going to change that.
The product I’m contemplating is the BoogerBall story I penned.
I know, roll your eyes and say, “Oh brother, what absurdity is he talking about now?” Well, I wrote a mildly humorous story some years ago called, “How to Make a BoogerBall” for my daughter Ellen. I posted it here, on my company website for the world to see. To my amazement, the world has seen it.
So that’s my product. Not a BoogerBall, not a book about BoogerBalls, but the story itself, How to Make a BoogerBall by Amos E. Avery. Why does this redefine success for me? Because it’s already a success. My goal is not to sell the story, but to get people to read it. My first website counter reached 4000 plus readers before I changed web hosts. The new site has over 29000 hits on that page. Blogs around the world have pages of comments about my story. It’s already a success. Anything I can do to gain more readers is a success and anything I can sell along the way is icing on the cake.
So here’s the plan. Launch BoogerBall.com as a legitimate site (it’s just forwarding to a page on my company site right now). Do all of the “product development” things I can’t help but do (you should see the pages of notes and drawings I have for just this idea alone). Develop manufacturing techniques, logos, packaging, identities, marketing strategies, support products, tag lines, graphics and compelling stories. Most importantly, write about all of it as I do it. BoogerBall.com will be the recipient of the finished product – the story and all of its supporting stuff. Averyswellidea.com will be the recipient of this first entry and all subsequent entries along the way. So, if you want to learn more about creativity mixed with faith mixed with foolishness mixed with practical product development insights, stay tuned.
-Amos
CSWP Advanced Weldments Specialist
I discovered yesterday from reading Mike Pucket’s blog that the SolidWorks certification team had released another advanced exam, CSWP Weldments. Since I am scheduled to teach a hands-on session at SolidWorks World next month titled, “Non-Welded Weldments – Using SolidWorks Weldment Tools and 3DContentCentral to Create Cool 80/20 Structures”, I thought it would be a good idea to get certified.
The first thing I discovered is that SolidWorks is just like any other company – their website is not up-to-date. The certification page in the Customer Portal lists a coupon code for subscription customers to take an advanced exam for free (one of the perks of being on subscription). The code didn’t work. It had expired 5 days ago. The Weldments exam wasn’t even listed. A quick email to certification@solidworks.com brought a new code from Av (Avelino Rochino, Certification Specialist) that worked just fine.
On to the Sample Exam. The nice thing about the sample exam which can be said about all of their sample exams, is that it is, in some ways, harder than the actual test. I know Weldments fairly well after creating over 40 weldment profile library features of 80/20 extrusions and uploading them to 3DContentCentral. It turns out that my weakness is 3D Sketches. I really had to work to get my answer to match the key on the last page of the sample. [Note to self, work on 3D sketch techniques.] Next the sample exam showed me something I’d never done before, a 3 member miter.
It’s possible to have 3 members come to a corner and miter all 3 together. It was new to me and took a few minutes to master – a few minutes well spent. So the sample exam was a challenge, but I did all right, so on to the real thing.
120 minutes, 27 questions. I jumped into the first few with fervor and made a few profiles. Something to consider if you work mostly in inches, make yourself a part template that is in metric as most every CSWP exam I’ve taken has started most excercises in metric units. Another suggestion that I teach my students is to add the Weldment Profiles directory to your Design Library task pane.
It makes it easier to create weldment profile library features (drag the sketch from the tree to the pane and drop it) and you get a nice preview of the profiles that you don’t get inside the weldment tools.
So I felt pretty confident after the first few consecutive questions and then I remembered my failure in the cave of 3D sketching. I took my own advice from the Sheet Metal exam – stop and read every problem. I’ve recently made lots of drawings with weldment cut list tables, so I jumped on those questions next. Then to the advanced questions which focused on proper profile alignment and finally the big 3D sketch problem. I was glad I saved this part for last because at that point I figured I had already passed the test. I’d also wasted 15 minutes of test time on a quick bio break and an urgent discussion with a customer about their customer who wanted us to fudge our paperwork because they made a mistake on their paperwork. There’s nothing like having someone ask you to throw away hours of work you did over 2 years to fix a paperwork glitch to distract you during a CSWP exam.
I tried hard, it looked perfect, but my 3D sketch answer didn’t match any of the choices. I triple checked, redrew some of it and still no match. Finally I chose the closest answer and the test ended. Wow, 120 minutes are gone and I passed. Not a perfect score, but I can proudly say that I’m the first person in Minnesota that chooses to be listed in the CSWP database to pass the Weldments exam. Hmmm. Well, my kids weren’t that impressed either. The good thing is that I can teach my SolidWorks World class with official credentials. And, I can now add CSWP-AWS to CSWP, CSWP-ASMS and of course, BSME. Woohoo!
The exam was pretty fair. There was one question series that didn’t specify a material in the questions but it was already chosen for you in the downloaded file you must start with. The other exams are notorious for throwing in material changes to catch you up, so I’m hyper sensitive to this – it should have been in the question a least for verification. Also, on my system, everything seemed to hang for an undetermined period of time after downloading a file (several times during the exam). This is a bit unnerving for fear the exam is locked up and all of your time will be wasted. Overall, a good test – glad I passed. I’m not sure where you stand on divine intervention, but I can honestly say that I thanked God more than once during the test for showing me something in question 12 that corrected a slight mistake I made in question 8. It’s a good thing you can go back and improve your answers. Say a little prayer before you begin, it will help.
-Amos