Hi I'm very new to Solid Works so be kind in your answers:-) I have designed a fuselage that I am happy with and would like to try my hand at building.

I need to know how to brake the drawing down into individual components so I can print them.

I have drawn the components in this case the bulkheads on there own planes I had hoped this would simplify things but I still cant work it out. Hope I'm not being to vague. Like I said I'm a noob at all this. Any help would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

Set up planes where you want your bulkheads to be and then open a sketch on each plane. Use the surface intersection tool to create a cross section. Notch it out for longitunal strips of balsa, then extrude to 1/16 (or whatever plywood you are using). You can then surface trim if you need to. Once you have it the way you want it, print it.

Thanks for you help Dave. My model is coming along in leaps and bounds now. Much appreciated:-)

Has anyone had any problems printing to scale with solid works? I have read on some forums that people are getting mixed results. Apparently it has something to do with the printer its-self. What are your thoughts? I came across this in Sketchup. It wasn't until I had finished cutting out the formers that I realized my mistake. I gave up on Skectup after that.

Anyone who can't print from SketchUp is going to have immense problems —the exact same ones— from any other CAD, including SolidWorks. Both have an enormous amount of help, both installed and online, for plotting, printing, vector rendering, and exporting.

Hi JCPatrick I must admit I didn't try that hard with Sketchup. I really enjoy designing and using CAD programs so I thought I'd learn to use Solidworks so I don't have much experience with Sketchup.

I must be the luckiest person I found a 3 view of a plane iv been wanting to model and build spent such a long time looking for this.

How do I fix this geometry for this lofted surface?

Hmmm.. there might be a few things going on there. Im not a pro, but my sense is that you are trying jam two quite disimilar sections together without giving it enough info.

If you want to loft as a solid, which would offer a lot of advantages:
- the sections should be continous loops (example black lines)
- if you can, avoid lines converging to a point like at your trailing edge (red elipse). Better to be a minimum thickness vertical segment TE or radius, it may help & probably what you have in real life anyway.
- utilize the airfoil upper & lower curves as guide curves (green lines), it will flow the loft better
- a technique I have seen a lot is only sketch the half section & then mirror about the center plane since the fuse is symetrical. This can help with lofting especially with spline based sections & further allow you to define tangency aboutthe center line

I did an example & used 2 sections similar to yours. But lofting form basically a 4 sided rectangle to a multi-segmented section like your tailpipe is pushing it in any event, they are so un-similar.

You could do surfaces too:
- but maybe better to break it down into logical chunks: upper surface + vertical edge surface + lower surface. Everything controlled by their respective guide curves, ideally smooth splines.
- if all individual surfaces look good, then knit the chunks

You really should get a book or DVD. There is a lot of technique & dos & donts with this stuff regardless of teh cad program. Trying to stumble through on your own is the long road.

Some screen caps of my attempt at your section (using solid loft, not surfacing)

Now by only modifying one section sketch, the resultant solid still lofts smoothly because the sketch end points & guide curve network are all connected correctly & using 3 sections in the loft kind of anchors 2. Here I distorted the the tail section noticeably just to demonstrate

Hi thank you for taking the time to do the examples, that was really cool and helpful:-) I made some of the changes you recommended and this is what I came up with. Looking much better.

My Solidworks book is in the mail.