Making a beehive

irene_rivers

I'm trying to make a beehive in the form of a hexagon.
My current plan has been to trace a beehive pattern, use the spline tool, trace the holes, and extrude them.  

This is the image: http://previews.123rf.com/images/alexandrmoroz/alexandrmoroz1206/alexandrmoroz120600016/13894400-black-honeycomb-pattern-isolated-on-a-white-Stock-Photo-hive.jpg

However, this also means that I have to use the line tool to trace over the other parts of the pattern to form a shape.
My current design technically works, but I rather have the beehive to be more symmetrical, so as to make it more aesthetically pleasing.

I've made the document "Beez Nuts" public, so please feel free to come check it out and give me any suggestions!
Does anyone have any ideas on how to make each hole the same size and be of equal distance from each other?
The holes near the edge of the hexagon should still be full size.

Thanks

NeilCooke

You also might want to take a look at onshape.com/featurescript where you'll find a fill pattern feature or maybe even the hex infill feature. 

bruce_williams

I took a stab at this.  First, I put the picture on a separate sketch so it can be hidden and I added a dimension to constrain it.  Then on a new sketch, I used the polygon sketch tool to make a true hexagon over the picture, offset that for wall, extruded the first cell, and then used linear part pattern & transforms to fill in the grid.  The size & spacing needs to be tweaked...I did not spend the time to get it perfect.  fun exercise!

see document at https://cad.onshape.com/documents/582e61c1a68076104d334eca/w/1780d3996a8c1d70999996f3/e/b61818da9bbcc6ab7d43c9b4 

TimRice

Looks pretty good Bruce. I took a try at it here: 
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/582e971221ea7b10345a2249/w/ca7d300287d1128b38bb4b8c/e/7bce4e89fe9ff0424b687aab.

TimRice

Thanks Bruce! We usually recommend using a face or part pattern as that will give you the best performance. Sketch patterns tend to slow down the document at very high sketch entity counts (which can happen easily with large patterns). I made the doc public so you should be able to copy it!

TimRice

Searching through public documents is not always the easiest. Could you share the doc url here?

NeilCooke

You also might want to take a look at onshape.com/featurescript where you'll find a fill pattern feature or maybe even the hex infill feature. 

bruce_williams

I took a stab at this.  First, I put the picture on a separate sketch so it can be hidden and I added a dimension to constrain it.  Then on a new sketch, I used the polygon sketch tool to make a true hexagon over the picture, offset that for wall, extruded the first cell, and then used linear part pattern & transforms to fill in the grid.  The size & spacing needs to be tweaked...I did not spend the time to get it perfect.  fun exercise!

see document at https://cad.onshape.com/documents/582e61c1a68076104d334eca/w/1780d3996a8c1d70999996f3/e/b61818da9bbcc6ab7d43c9b4 

TimRice

Looks pretty good Bruce. I took a try at it here: 
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/582e971221ea7b10345a2249/w/ca7d300287d1128b38bb4b8c/e/7bce4e89fe9ff0424b687aab.

bruce_williams

Very elegant Tim!  That was clever to put two cells together; saves the math too.    I forgot pattern has 2nd direction and I should have added the parts.  thanks for the lesson!

A couple questions - 
1) What is best practice on patterns?  The honeycomb could be sketch pattern, feature pattern, or part pattern.
2) Could you share your document with copy permission?  I would like to go through it.

TimRice

Thanks Bruce! We usually recommend using a face or part pattern as that will give you the best performance. Sketch patterns tend to slow down the document at very high sketch entity counts (which can happen easily with large patterns). I made the doc public so you should be able to copy it!

cameron_mcknight_macneil

An idea- use the polygon tool to draw a hexagon in a sketch. Use the line offset tool to copy the same hexagon to define a wall thickness. Extrude the resulting face to make a singal hexagonal tube.

Finally, use the linear pattern tool to copy the tube into a honeycomb. All the offsets can be measured from the sketch.

See image below, or public document 'Honeycomb Experiment'



Seems to work ok.

irene_rivers

Thank you guys!  I'm printing the file right now and it looks amazing  

stefan_nilsson

I took a different approach. In order to constrain the honeycomb to an arbitrary rectangle i could not use a regular polygon. Instead i used line segments constrained by the dimensions of the surrounding rectangle. I then extruded the line segments into surfaces which were in turn thickened and drafted.

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/dacbc19cd210f1b493b25c15/w/0aab4ce7a97e22170236e834/e/53cf2ea73b8998f65c5ad7d7