Design – Page 2 – Keyboard Monkeys

The Savage Race is coming up very soon and this will be our 5th year participating. Every year I say I’m going to start training earlier, and every year I fail to start as early as I would like. Even though I didn’t get an early start, I’ve been training for a few weeks and so far I’ve been focusing mainly on my running. When it comes to the obstacles, my upper body strength isn’t usually an issue; my only real concern is my grip strength and my running stamina. 6+ miles and 30 obstacles takes it’s toll on you.

But regardless of how well I am prepared or how well I perform, the best part about doing the race is my team. It started out with my brother, sister, and son, and now has grown to include my nieces, nephew and family friends. The camaraderie of not just the team, but every participant is amazing. Throughout the race you are guaranteed to have complete strangers cheering you on, encouraging you and even helping you on obstacles if you need it.

And every year there are tons of teams dressed for the event and they will wear everything from cowboy hats, boots and daisy dukes (usually guys) to face paint and tutus. It’s great to see all the team outfits, but my team has never dressed as a team… until now. While we’re not quite ready to wear short-shorts or make-up (yet), we will all be sporting the same logo:

I probably won’t make this design available for sale in my shop, because even though it is my original design, it is based on the video game of the same name and I don’t want to step on the toes of the creators (Team 17). But if you are interested in any of my other designs, you can check them out in my shop at: https://www.etsy.com/shop/krileydesignshop

In addition to being a writer, I’m also a designer. Most of my career has been spent around screen and digital printing so most of my design skills have developed around graphic design and color and material design. These skills have served me well, and I have successfully translated these skills into woodworking and other design applications but when it came to true 3D design, my skills and tools were sadly lacking.

In a previous position I designed and 3D printed some sample display assets, and last year my wife and son decided I needed a 3D printer of my own, so I have some CAD experience, but everything I’d done was with the free TinkerCAD software, which is extremely limited. But by designing some of the complex shapes in Illustrator and exporting as an svg file to be imported into TinkerCAD, I was able to get around a lot of the limitations. Eventually, though, those limitations became too much so I finally listened to the advice of others and signed up for the free Fusion 360 “startup” license.

For anyone interested in learning CAD, CAM & CAE software, I cannot recommend this highly enough. A design engineer I used to work with recommended it to me and I can only kick myself for waiting so long to download it.

Like most professional CAD/CAM software, there is a steep learning curve, but there are tons of tutorials online, through autodesk themselves as well as from other design professionals. It also really helps having a son who is somewhat experienced with solidworks to give me pointers, but there is plenty of information and helpful forums on line for those of you without engineering students to rely on.

My first Fusion 360 project from scratch was a speedloader/thumbsaver for a 9mm. It went through a couple iterations to get where I wanted it, but it turned out great and was an awesome learning experience. Now I just have to come up with my next project.