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Drawing an F1 car using CAD (73 posts)

Topic tags: F1 CAD

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Guilherme said 8 months, 2 weeks ago:

After nearly two months without even touching on this project, I decided to give it a go this week. These past two days I’ve been working on the nose cone and I am very pleased with the result thus far. Right now I’m not bothering with the regulations much because this area of design is relatively free, with only a few minimum cross section area rules to the tip of the nose and the front wing mounting pylons. I’ll check that later and should it be outside the regulations I’ll fix, but I’m not caring much at all.

Sketches

These are the two sketches I used to draw most of the shape of the nose cone, using the extrude -> intersection feature. After that I was just using fillets to do away with the sharp edges…

Wing pylons

This was one piece I though would give me a lot of headache, but turned out to be very easy (granted, my design is extremely simple), and the fillet around the area where the nose and the pylons meet worked brilliantly, against my expectations.

Nose, tip opening

This one was very simple to do, but I liked the end result so much!

And here are some more better-rendered images of the beta version of the nose cone:

I am not a Ferrari fan by the way!

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Guilherme said 8 months, 2 weeks ago:

@moojoe Sorry I took so long to reply, but I guess my interest with the project waned quite a bit when my classes resumed last month. I’m quite motivated now however :)

Thanks for the tips! I didn’t know about the fasteners. In fact, I don’t know much at all about the assembly environment, and since CADLearning videos are not free anymore, I guess I’ll need some help with that :P

Yes, I am using the hole command!

With regard to the cooling ducts, I just used three sketches to create a “path” and then used the loft surface (I tried to use loft solid and then shell, but for some reason the shell operation was requesting a micrometric value…) and then thicken. The challenging part was that aero bit that sort of touches the tyre. Now, I don’t quite remember how I did it, but I remember that I wanted to sweep it from the front to the rear face of the tyre, but didn’t want it to go through the brake duct (you know, making it go around it), and that was annoying because there was no option on either sweep or extrude that would do that! In the end I had to adjust he duct manually so they wouldn’t intersect much.

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Guilherme said 8 months, 1 week ago:

What, no comments on the nosecone? I’m disappointed :P

Anyways, I’m starting the remaining parts of the survival cell. Today I did the padding around the driver’s head, and I think it’s looking pretty good. I’d also like to announce I’ve hired two drivers. They are both dead, but since the car doesn’t exist it won’t be a problem.

And here’s a closer look at what is so far the most complex part of the car:

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Keith Collantine said 8 months, 1 week ago:

@Guilherme Superb choice of drivers!

The tip of the nose looks a bit more sloped than the 2012 cars. Is this because you’re avoiding having a step?

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dragoll said 8 months, 1 week ago:

@Guilherme I’m staggered at the amount of detail you’re able to get into this project despite the lack of intimate knowledge that a team has of their own creations.

@keithcollantine I tracked back from your twitter post, great idea showing this thread off!

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Keith Collantine said 8 months, 1 week ago:

@dragoll Always like to show off the best community stuff and this is really first-rate.

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Rocky said 8 months, 1 week ago:

This look like such an exciting project, not sure what your level of CAD experience is (mine is 0) but you must have hours into this. Looks like a fun way to develop your skills. Even if I was experienced with CAD I’m still not sure I would have found the red button. Looking forward to seeing weekly updates.

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Guilherme said 8 months, 1 week ago:

@keithcollantine I first thought of writing the names on the airbox, much like Sauber did in 2010, but I wanted to make this little joke for so long that I decided the padding was good enough :P Yes, I’m not going for the stepped nose solution, purely from an aesthetics point of view. But looking at the pictures I posted it looks much more slopped than it actually is, so here is a orthographic side view:

Thanks for linking the thread on your Twitter by the way!

@dragoll when I try to do something, I try to do it as perfect as possible within my capabilities, so yes, I do spend a lot of time adding detail and redoing refining things until I’m satisfied. I must have done and redone the nosecone about 5 times now (one today even).

@rocky I’ll try to update this thread at least once every two or three days! I’m working on what’s left of the survival cell and it should be done by tomorrow. My experience with CAD was 99% limited to 2D on AutoCAD, and if you look at the first pages of the thread you’ll see that I didn’t even know then about this software I’m using now, so yes, it is a magnificent way of developing skills :)

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Paulocreed said 8 months, 1 week ago:

This is extremely cool! Good job @Gullherme Can’t wait to see the final product. I’m an amateur fan of autoCAD but have not used it in years, since I graduated college in Electronics. But this is sheer amazing!

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Guilherme said 8 months, 1 week ago:

@paulocreed Thanks!

Here are some pictures from today. The car is starting to take shape now. I’m not completely happy so tomorrow there will be more work on this area (the splitter is looking good though!), and hopefully I’ll be able to start the roll structure Friday at the latest. I also need to make the mirrors so this part of the car is going take much longer than I anticipated.

Splitter

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Kingshark said 8 months, 1 week ago:

Still a better aerodynamic design than HRT! :P

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Paulocreed said 8 months, 1 week ago:

@guilherme The cool thing is that you can always modify it. Just start with a baseline to have the overall shape you want and then modify to your preference.

That is what the teams do anyhow. They make a base to start with and then improve.

Maybe you can even try doing a car without any restrictions like RBR did with GT5 with the X2010 for example.

I think a real mean looking F1 car would be something like the 2006 or 2008 era cars with the 2010-2012 era front wings.

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juergen said 8 months, 1 week ago:

Very interesting, I am a student still, but as part of my side project I was going to do a single piece of an F1 car, and look at you, you start with the whole car!, way to go gilherme. you have encourage me to download inventor and start soon. By the way, where did you get the regulations in regards of dimensions ?

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Guilherme said 8 months, 1 week ago:

Ugh, the software crashed and I lost almost three hours of work. I was well into the roll structure/airbox. Absolutely gutted.

@juergen I’m glad my work gave you the motivation you needed. I got the regulations from the FIA website ( http://www.fia.com/en-GB/sport/regulations/Pages/FIAFormulaOneWorldChampionship.aspx ). My other references are the Red Bull Haynes manual, the cutaway BMW Sauber F1.08 and this picture from the failed USF1 car ( http://hunnylander.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/type-1-cad-drawing-with-detail-of-the-transverse-gearbox.jpg ). The Cosworth website has some nice info and a clear picture of their engine too ( http://americas.cosworth.com/sport/f1/the-technology/specification/ ), as has Pirelli has on their tyres (http://www.pirelli.com/tyre/ww/en/f1/tyre-range.html).

And of course, the hundreds of pictures @keithcollantine posts every race weekend help out immensely.

Hope it helps.

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dot_com said 8 months, 1 week ago:

@Guilherme – are you rendering from within AutoCAD? It looks fantastic! I’ve been using 3D Studio Max for a number of years but never got to play around with AutoCADs 3D. Great work, stick with it!

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