Today we have made a pocket knife by assembling a pivoting blade and handle which houses the blade. In order for us to have made this knife. We started off by making the body of the handle as so..
The sketch was not yet fully defined in this image, but always make sure to fully define your sketched to satisfy your design intent. A good way to fully define splines is to use the Fix relation for the spline handles.We then extruded this 2D drawing and added a few more features to finish the front piece of the handle.
As you can see, we basically made another sketch on top of the front face and used Extrude Cut in order to add square like holes for gripping and aesthetic purposes. Now for the back piece of the handle.
We made a new sketch on a plane offset about 1/10 an inch from the back of the front face to create the back part of the handle. The bottom of the handle is identical in symmetry to the front so we use Convert Entities on the Sketch Toolbar to replicate the bottom geometry, then we subsequently use a splines to construct the top. Notice how we changed the view to 'Hidden Lines Removed' in order to better sketch on top of our front section. Once we have played with our spline to satisfy the shape we want, we use Extrude Boss/Base to create the solid. Here it is..
Next we use Extrude Cut to cut more features into the back of our handle. We also use Fillets to smooth out the outer edges of the handle. Once complete we came up with this..
Now lets add a nice cosmetic piece to the round hole in our handle.
As you may have already guessed, we easily created this by sketching a circle on the bottom face of the top piece of the handle, and proceeded to extrude it outwards using the Draft feature to add a slight taper. Now we dome the top for a nice rounded face.
Now lets add the finishing touches. Here we make this sketch by making a new plane slightly above the domed round piece.
Finally, we used Extrude Cut and Fillet to smooth out the edges.
Once we have completed this pocket knife handle. We construct the blade.
With our blade constructed and our handle finished we finally assemble the two parts. There is a hole that get drills through the blade that allows it to pivot across a pin that transverses the handle and blade. This is done later in the assembly drawing using New Part in your assembly drawing. Where you can make a part within the assembly, in this case the pin. Sometimes it is useful to make new parts within your assembly because they allow you to gauge your design intent while being able to keep the other components in mind. This is useful if you are winging a part and don't have exact measurements and dimensions to design off of, as in the case of this knife.
And now for a full open blade.
In order to assemble the three parts (remember we made a pin in the assembly drawing), we use what are called Mates. More will be covered on Mates later on. Finally we assign material to the blade and handle and do a final render.
Thanks guys. Hope you like it. Remember, always work with the blade away from your body.
