After I mounted the dynamo to the marvellous machine it had a little shake which gave me some pause. Because the piece is to travel many thousands of miles in the back of a transport truck I became worried about a failure. The solution was to create another bracket which attached to the top portion. As I looked at the space it became apparent that if I added a bracket here it would interfere with the next gear I was going to add.
I decided to offset the gear to the left and use the same bracket to hold it in place. I hand held the gear in position and then took some quick measurements.
Then I opened EnRoute and began to create some scaled vector shapes. The simple functions of drawing in EnRoute allowed me the freedom to design the shapes separately and then combine them later. The circle at the top represents the smoke stack to which I would be welding the bracket. We would use this to trim the bracket to shape in order for it to fit perfectly around the stack. The box was used to determine scale and would also be used to trim the final shape..
Once I had the shapes I needed I combined them.
I then used the jigsaw tool to trim it to shape on three sides.
As I checked the final shape I noticed there was one sharp point in the curve (bottom left) I knew this would be there. The solution to fix it was simple.
I used the point edit to remove one vector node and the curve became perfect.
With that small correction the file was ready to be exported as a DXF and then sent off to the MultiCam plasma cutter.
