After a couple weeks off for some family vacationing and making some decisions on what will be done for Halloween this year, it is now down to crunch time. The two project deadlines that I have approaching are the laughing place (current deadline September 17th) and the Halloween party (October 28th). In reality I promised my wife that my Halloween party new construction work would be done by the end of September (to supposedly reduce the stress that we have before the party). So I guess the Halloween Party deadline will be September 30th (although I am sure some last minute fine tuning will still be going on).

Here is an update on the current project states...

The Laughing Place has sat dormant for too long. It is time to get this project that has sat around for an embarrassing amount of time to a level of completion that is usable. That is my goal by the 17th, not to have the project a completed mountain, but to get the work done so that my sons can at least enjoy it finally. I have finally made some headway with the Solidworks modeling portion of the project. Here is a snapshot of the current Solidworks model.

Overall I am pleased that I switched from using Sketchup to Solidworks. There is still a lot to learn, but how accurately I am able to now model what I actually want to build as opposed to just what the project is going to look like is amazing. To be fair, Sketchup is upfront that is not a CAD tool, but it didn't stop me from trying to use it like one. I still have a fair amount of modeling work to be done, but I am planning on completing that work in the later evenings as I construct outside the parts of the completed model. That's not an ideal way to operate... but then again, my most productive periods never are.

FYI... Here is a snapshot of the laughing place as it stands tonight. I was just finishing up adding a beam to the structure. The official end to me procrastinating on the project.

As for Halloween, the project that I have decided to work on this year is the Drinking Machine (I am going to have to come up with a better name for this project). That combined with building on the animation work I did on the pumpkins earlier this year I think is going to keep me busy seeing as I have only about 7 more weeks left until my official deadline. I have ordered some parts to help me prototype my ideas for the drinking machine as well as I am hoping to try out my rather new Solidworks skills to help with the design. I have also ordered a midi adapter finally for the electronic drum kit I bought so that I can move forward on my new ideas for programming the pumpkins. That's it for now, I will post some more soon.

I finally managed to get some time to make some headway with learning modeling with Solidworks this weekend. I bought a book called Engineering Design with Solidworks. It was rated well, but the author seemed to jump all over the place. Maybe the book would have been more helpful if I wasn't starting completely from scratch, but it felt a little difficult to follow... But on the other hand, I did find out that the tutorials that ship with Solidworks are absolutely excellent! I still got a few more tutorials that I would like to do, but I already feel that I got a good handle on part modeling with Solidworks. The one skill I still feel a little light on is working with assemblies with Solidworks. It's probably not hard and I just need a little more practice.

I do want to mention that a friend of mine lent me his 3dconnexion Space Nagivator to try out as I was using Solidworks. Wow! I absolutely love it for working with 3d models... I have never so easily managed and navigated a 3d model before. I also saw that they have drivers for Linux and that it works with blender (another tool I would like to get better at). This is an awesome product and definitely worth a purchase if you are working with 3d models. Thanks Steve!

Back to Solidworks... I am trying to figure out what is the best way to break my laughing place project components into. Do I make every single piece of wood, bracket, and bolt for the project an individual part in Solidworks? Or do I make the substructure a part, and the components that bolt on to the structure parts? Are there built in parts for lumber that I use (I haven't had the chance to research this yet)? I am hoping these answers come to me quickly as I am hoping to be close to finally modeling my project in Solidworks. Hopefully I'll get to bottom of these questions and more this week.