Amatom Round Handles

The first family began with a table of almost 2500 entries, a construction process that used ten commands, computed three variables from the data in the table, and was very difficult to construct. Through examining the data in each of the entries and combining the ones with the same geometric data under a common entry, the table size was reduced to under 800 entries.

By changing from a combination of B-rep and CSG construction techniques to purely B-rep techniques, the number of commands was reduced to seven, a variable was eliminated, and the construction became much easier. With the B-rep model only nine parameters had to be assigned variables. These are three line lengths, one circle diameter, one fillet radius, two hole diameters, and two hole depths. Under the original scheme, fourteen parameters have to be controlled.

This family consists of almost 800 members, each with a model that takes up over 100 Kb of disk space. If all 800 members were to be created, they would consume 82 megabytes of disk space, and 800 lines in the list of parts on the system. By using this method, the storage has been reduced to around 150 Kb of space, while still allowing any part to be created almost instantly.

Last Modified: Wed Aug 28 14:41:29 EDT 1996