complex STL to reproduce

nelson_pereira280

hi all,
i have a complex shape to reproduce in CAD. It's an STL file. This seems like very complicated to undertake so I'm wondering, what is the best way to undertake something like this? Where do I start?
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/8ccc1c91e04d1896642c415e/w/d95336ff0baaa0c388655d04/e/b4f431200de8954e10a69dab

S1mon

Depending on how parametric you want everything to be, this seems pretty straightforward. Almost all of the features are very prismatic. There are some surfaces which are spline based (but still extruded along the other axis), and one swept but most of it is simple rectangles and fillets.

In general, you want to start from the largest features and work your way down to the details. 

Here's a start. This took me about 20 minutes.

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/542c6642a40fff2b749a63e1/w/43d98a8365702775f8107d50/e/7f6e5b05734c9546f63e1eff

In this case I did most stuff aligning to vertices of the STL. If you want this to be more parametric, you'll need to remove all the references, and add dimensions, thinking about how you might want to change it.

The inside will be a little interesting because the inconsistent wall thicknesses and the pattern of grooves is a little tricky, but it is still prismatic.

nelson_pereira280

so I was able to do pretty much to my surprise, what I wanted to do. Although, I have one last thing to do is repeat a extrude (remove) line across one face and I cant seem to figure out how to do it. the yellow below is the original STL that I'm trying to copy with some mods.