Terminal Strips

This family was popular enough for someone to create a library of wireframe profiles of these parts using CADDS4X, which wasn't a parametric modeler. At least one user had started to create regular parametric models of this family that could be easily modified to create any of the parts in the family.

The storage space required for instances of this part may be fairly small, around 300 Kb for the smallest member of the family. However, unlike the other models that don't change size significantly among the members of the family, this part grows as the number of segments in the model changes. Since changing the number of segments actually changes the number of entities in the model, the file size grows as the modeled part grows. The largest part in the family requires one and a half megabytes of disk storage space.

This was probably the most time-consuming of all of the families. There are many different ways to create this part, not all of which work very well. The first few attempts to create this part failed when the number of segments changed. The amount of detail included in the model can also greatly affect the modeling process. When the fillets were added to the fins, the method of creating the fins had to completely change. Once the final methodology was determined, creating the model is fairly simple, and doesn't take much time, but a lot of time and effort went into deriving a suitable methodology for the part.

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