Sometime last year I started following an Autodesk Inventor user who was studying Automotive and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bradford and was posting on Twitter what he was using Autodesk Inventor for along with screen shots of the design he was working on. To cut a long story short I contacted 21 year old Mindaugas Petrikas to get some more information of what he was working on and how he came to be using Autodesk Inventor. Here’s his story….
“I love transportation – for as long as I can remember I have been interested in anything that can move a person from A to B, and about 4 years ago I found out about kit cars, I liked the idea that a person could build their own car in the garage and then drive it. This spurred me into finding out more about how I could design and manufacture my own kit car.
At the time my Cousin was a user of Autodesk 3ds Max and after talking to him about my ambition to design and build a kit car he showed what 3ds Max was capable of to see how this could help realise my dream. After reading through some tutorials and experimenting myself I managed to create some pretty good designs but realised that I needed more engineering focus.
This lead me to enrolling in the Automotive and Mechanical Engineering course at the University of Bradford. During one of our lectures we were learning about the different software available in the industry for automotive design and I also found out about the Autodesk Student Community and that as a student I could register and download Autodesk software to use on my course for free. I wasted no time, registered on the Autodesk Student Community and looked into what software was available, found Autodesk Inventor Professional so downloaded, installed and got to work.
My goal was to have all of the required drawings ready by the time I need them when I graduate so I can use them to create a new vehicle and a business as a kit car manufacturer. I started building the frame, refining the design as I went using the simulation tools with Inventor Professional. The second and the most important step was the suspension. It was the time I realised the full potential of Autodesk Inventor. By using assemblies, Inventors Design Accelerators and contact solver I could test almost everything I needed; all the qualities of the suspension that makes the car easy to handle and responsive. After that came the body panels and the other smaller parts of the design.
I now have everything I need to actually go and manufacture the car if the opportunity arose. But the thing is, I had so much fun and excitement modelling it, and managed to complete the design sooner than I thought I would, that whilst I have the time, I will continue to refine and develop the design.
The ability to transfer ones thoughts into something visual on a computer and interact with the object still astonishes me. I have spent a lot of time on this project (sometimes it gained higher priority than sleeping) and I look forward to spend some more.
All in all Autodesk Inventor satisfies both of my personality sides – the creative one and the engineering one.”
Here's the design Mindaugas has been working on in Autodesk Inventor - all of the design, engineering and visualisations were created using Inventor which was downloaded from the Autodesk Student Community:
All images are Copyright of Mindaugas Petrikas and should not be re-used without prior permission.
You can keep up to date with Midaugas's project via:
Blog - http://petrikas.blogspot.com/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/#!/MPetrikas
LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=127552964
