Personal Solidworks Project Jakob Klo EDSGN 100 21AUG2017

Top view of the USS model

A closer view of the Starboard 5-inch guns

A view of the stern of the ship and its aft triple 14-inch gun turrets

Note: All dimensions are in inches

Fig.1

For my personal solidworks project, I knew I wanted to create something that would keep my interested in the project and I could be proud of in the end. Since I am extremely interested in military history, and a midshipman in Penn States NROTC unit I decided I should do an old warship. In trying to figure out what ship to do, I narrowed it down to an , or as they are shapes would be a lot more practical to model in solidworks. I ended up deciding on the USS Pennsylvania (BB-38) since it holds the namesake of our state, and I pass the bell from the ship most days, it is located outside the Wagner building. In my background research for the ship, I found a two view drawing of the battleship that included a scale (Fig.1). I decided to split the ship into three parts. The first being the 14-inch gun turrets since there were four of them completely, and are identical. The next part would be the secondary 5-inch guns as there were eight of them and are all identical. The last part would be the , , smoke stack, and masts as these were all connected anyway and were not repeated anywhere on the ship. The 14-inch gun turrets were relatively simple utilizing extrudes, revolves, linear patterns. The primary difficulty was in creating a plane at an angle. I was able to figure out how to this and create a 45 degree plane by using a vertical plane, and a horizontal one as references for the new plane I created. The 5-inch guns were also fairly simple the main body of the guns were made by revolving half of a cross section of the gun around the center axis. After this, I simply extruded several shape to create the mount in rests on. The hull is where I hit some difficulties however. My initial approach was to create drawings of the ship from the top view at each level from a deck plan I found of a similar ship. After creating all eight decks, I attempted to loft them together to create the shape of the hull. This is where the limitations of the loft function became apparent, as the different decks were not all the same general shape resulting in the loft getting confused and connecting wrong points. This meant that the shape I ended up getting looked nothing like the intended shape. My solution was to instead create a series of vertical sections of the hull and loft the horizontally, as the sections would all be the same general shape. For each of these sections I was able to only make one side and mirror it, as the ship is symmetrical. Once the entire hull was created, I cut and extruded the various mounting points for the guns, and extruded out the conning tower, and smoke stack. The next difficulty came in the masts. I had created two sketches of 18 circles in a circular pattern and intended to just loft the sketch to the other. I found out however that the only way to do this was to loft each individual circle to its counterpart, resulting in 18 separate lofts per mast. One of the new features I learned was the split feature. This feature allowed me to easily split the hull horizontally into two bodies which is how I split the hull into the red portion and the grey. Thankfully once it came time to assembling the parts it was relatively simple thanks to the cuts in the hull I made for all of the guns. This meant that I simply had to mate them in position and then mate one plane per gun to a plane on the hull. The Solid works portion of the class taught me many skill that will be useful in both future classes at Penn State, as well as in a future career. For one it gave us an entirely new way for us to model and communicate our ideas. The models that we make in solidworks can also be used in 3D printing which is becoming much more useful in modern engineering. The skills we learned in solid works can also be easily transitioned to other modeling softwares.

References

Fig. 1 - http://lioness-nala.deviantart.com/art/USS-Pennsylvania-BB-38-in-1920- 1925-446132851