It's time again for another exhilarating tutorial! ;-)

I found this 1950's style hand-held mixer (egg beater) and here is how I reconstructed it. (It was made from memory.)



Make the body first. It's made of chrome-plated steel and is in two parts held in place by bolts on the side.
Start with the profile using one freeform curve. Keep the ends perpendicular, or in a straight line, so that the revolved surface remains flat.


Revolve the profile. Also stretch the new shape out in a side view to whim.


There is a rest stand foot on the back end made as part of the same cabinet.
Come out of the side, follow along and end with two points perpendicular at the end. Copy/mirror it and join it together as one curve.


Draw a 'U'-shaped profile and Sweep it on the path.


Boolean Union this to the body. You may need to try a series of other procedures such as Boolean Merge along with hiding and deleting to get what you need.
Join anything separate together and try a nice Fillet.


The body is two pieces, but it was easier to draw one with a faux seam. Just next to the seam, there are ventilation ports.
A rectangle with rounded corners will work.
Rotate and copy them around. They should probably only be on top as food may splash into the holes on the real one.


Project each port shape to the body surface and Trim them to the surface. Delete the extras.
There is a non-UI feature called "Merge". I am not sure if this is the same as the Boolean Merge command, but since the segments of the new curve may be in pieces, you'll need to put them back together in one whole.


Here I Extruded the edge shape inward a little to get depth, I used a line to guide the direction of the extrude to 45 degrees where needed.
You can also shrink all of the port shapes (copies of them) inward and perform a Loft between the edge curves and the copy.
Join these new walls to the body. Try to Fillet them to get a nice "punched-in" contour.


For the blade connection neck, make a rounded rectangle, extrude it, place it partially inside of the body shape and Boolean Union.
Trim, delete and etc then join it to the body and Fillet it.


I added more shapes and more fillets.


Here we make the handle. A broad slopping arc is needed for the path course. On the profile end, I made a good shape from one freeform curve so that there would be no BRep lines. Those sometimes cause problems. I used reference construction lines to help.


Sweep the profile along the path.


Two lines in the right view plane allowed me to Boolean Trim (via projection magic) the sweeped shape to remove excess and give a nice set of edges.


A freeform curve was made to cut the profile forming the handle shape. I shaped it so that the mixer could sit flat on the handle and stand while leaning back a little. Boolean trim the curve and delete the rest.


Fillet the edges for comfort. :-)


There are two large bolts on the side. These not only hold the two metal shell halves together, but those are affixed to the motor chassis.
On some models I've seen, taking one bolt out at a time allows access to an oil fill hole to service the motor.
Use a series of extruded circles or cylinders that are Unioned and Filleted to look nice. Mirror to the other side of the body before union is executed.


Needed a place for the on switch. Make a rounded rectangle. Extrude it and give it a rounded Fillet.
Trim it from the handle and Fillet again to make it look nice. Keep in mind that the Fillet does not play nice with BRep and edge lines, especially intersections.
(murmur...)


To make the switch, I used the Custom Star tool and applied a Fillet to smooth the points out. Added a toggle lever.
Tried to Fillet the edges... whoa boy... scratch that... Blend, no... Loft, no... Okay, to keep it from looking like it was cut from glass and would cut you if you used it I gave it as much shape as I could by performing a Sweep between two copies of the toggle profile and augmented it with a Sizing Path.


Hmmm... need some mixer blades. Those are tricky...
Lets see... Made a super-ellipsoid profile shape and Revolved it to make a kind of an egg. I copied them and move them to where they slightly coincided. Unioned them together. Separated them and holes were left. I Blended the hole edges together so that the curvatures of the revolved surfaces would dictate the new shape. Since the edges were only so much apart, it made a nicely shaped ring with a 'c'-shaped curvature to it's profile.
Made a rotated copy and tried to Union the two blades together...
There was some tricky patchwork to follow, but all I had to do was Revolve a rod to complete the mixer blade.
I'm sure there are easier ways to make these things: maybe some kind of sweep along paths...


Position the blade and a rotated copy (as blades are situated on common egg-beaters).


Voila!!! Why it's a nice retro egg beater. Here are some details...


Give it some color and final details...


Rotate the whole assembly so that it sits on its handle-end and body stand.



Now that I made you an egg-beater go on and make me a cake!... ;-)

I'm speachless...
Thanks for your tutorials, really.

With the new lighting your model shine!

Regards
Luca

Hey Magic,
Very nice again.. You present your workflow well...

I wanted to inject something.. regarding the switch.. You wanted to soften the edge and had some failed commands??? (Not suggesting I dont like your switch)

When you make the initial "star" shape, dont fillet it yet.. Go ahead and add your thumb extension and create the solid, then attempt to add the fillet to the solid..



Surely it can depend on the shape too, and not succeed, but "pre-filleting" the curve, will pretty much ensure only a very tiny fillet will fit...

Great stuff again...

Thank you Luca!!!



You gotta hand it to Michael, what other 3D program lets you work on-the-fly with your model in such style?


Burr, thanks! But that's what I did: (??) I made the star wheel with filleted corners, unioned in the thumb extension, extruded the shape and... all sizzle and no steak. :-(

There must have been some kind of overlapping or too sharp of a line direction change somewhere.

I'll take another stab at it for practice sake.

Wow!!! Thanks so much for posting all this stuff. Really fantastic!!!

I agree with Jim - really nice tutorial.

This thread is getting kinda long. For easier searching and reading, I'd recommend starting a new thread with new subject line for each project.

Keep 'em coming :)

Ed

Thanks for the great encouragement guys!

I concur with that notion, ed. I'll go ahead and make a separate thread for any new projects.
I should also make a page on my site for Michael to link to in the tutorials (Resources) page.

Announcement::::

From now on, I'll be posting tutorials and project of interest to MoI users in separate forum entries, to make navigating simple.

All my tutorials in their associated MoI3D forum entries will now also be linked from the following page on my site:

http://k4icy.50webs.com/tutorials.html


Michael,

Could you please add this link to the tutorials section in your Resources page?

Thanks,

Mike

Hi Magic,

""""""Burr, thanks! But that's what I did: (??) I made the star wheel with filleted corners, unioned in the thumb extension, extruded the shape and... all sizzle and no steak. :-("""""""""

Burr wrote:

Make star wheel (Note, NO filleted corners on star), Union thumb extension, extrude the shape, "FILLET SOLID NOW".....

Silly Fillet tool. ;-)

Thanks Burr!




Easier for Fillets to be figured from multiple connecting segments that are more straight, then from tight bends, I guess.

Hi Mike,

> Could you please add this link to the tutorials section
> in your Resources page?

Thanks for putting them all together on your own site! I've added a link to your page on the MoI Resources page.

- Michael

Thank you Michael!!!!

This is awesome! :-D

Hi Mike,

> Easier for Fillets to be figured from multiple connecting
> segments that are more straight, then from tight bends, I guess.

Yeah that can happen - basically when you have all sharp edges being filleted all at once, the fillet mechanism will basically know up front that there will need to be a corner patch built at the spot where the fillet surfaces come together.

If you have some pieces already filleted and then try to fillet more ones that are colliding into those with the same radius, you basically have a lot more little surface pieces involved and that makes things more complex. It will end up trying to do things like building fillet surfaces between some of those already existing fillet surfaces rather than knowing right away to do corner patches instead.

So if you want to put the same radius on everything it can be good to do it all at once rather than some pieces at a time. If you're doing things with different radius values then do the big radius values first and then the smaller ones after.

- Michael

Thanks Michael,
I'm in awe that there is something new (to me) to learn everyday with MoI. Especially when you get into the UI and scripting.
Thanks for the explanation - that actually makes a lot of sense after getting to know NURBS construction a little.

Mike

Hello,
I'm a new user, sorry for the question.. How exactly did you make the cut in the path? see the image
Thank you
Franz

Hi Franz - Select both curves and do a mutual trim, remove the top two lines which will leave a |_| shape, then do a fillet on that shape and you should then get the outline curves you are looking for.

Martin

Hello Martin, many thanks... I didn't understand that I have to select the "entire" joined curved and then Moi asked me to select the vertices... now it looks obviuos...
I have downloaded MoI 2.5 trial some days ago and I'm looking for tutorials and examples to learn t use it. I will continue trying to follow this tutorial, may I ask you something else if (surely) I will need?

thank you
ciao Franz

Just ask away, if I can't help, there are more here who will respond too. Have fun with MoI, it's a wonderful tool, but it does take a little getting used to it, and we all understand that.

Martin

Pekeron, good luck with your learning of MoI!

When I produced my tutorials I was also learning how to use MoI at the same time. There are many smaller procedures that were not included.

Simply post your modeling question to the Forum and someone is sure to tackle it for you.


I have realized that MoI, with all it's simplicity has a lot of subtle rules that are not in any books, but are better learned through experience and use.
It's user interface isn't overloaded with mysterious icons and menus, so it is only as complex as you need it to be according to your level of expertise.
That's one beauty of MoI - it's intuitive enough so that many of the more esoteric procedures and methods for modeling are learned cumulatively by trial and error, and not so much by official instruction or course.
Every few days or so I still learn some new little part of MoI. After a year and all my tutorials, I just recently learned how to use C-Plane and Silhouette.

I'll be making more tuts in good time, but at the moment I'm engrossed in a more complex design/art project. I've been working on it for a month now and the end product is not as close as I'd like it to be.

Hi Mike, yeah that's basically become the primary strategy - trying to get something that hopefully lets you get stuff done initially but that has enough depth that you can gain efficiency with it over time as you learn various nuances.

The tricky part can be that some kinds of models are just inherently more challenging than others, especially ones where there is more stuff swooping around in 3D and not as heavily based off of 2D curve construction. There is just more stuff to absorb for those kinds of things before being able to make things work.

- Michael