Teardrops n Tiny Travel Trailers

Good morning, and congratulations on a very pretty and slippery design!

Your design thread answered the primary question I had today; is Fusion 360 a good package for trailer design?

More specifically, we're designing a larger streamliner, and need to create a male mold & batten structure to form the shell around. Do you feel that Fusion 360 makes it fairly trivial to create compound curves? Would we be able to specify a shell thickness and reduce the mold dimensions by that amount so we could have the molds CNC routed?

The front of the trailer will be flat panels coming together and edge-joined with radii similar to yours, while the back will taper following a few different and much more complex curves.

I could haul out Skene's "Elements of Yacht Design" and draft this by hand, but I think I should stagger into the current century finally and learn something a little more modern.

Also, check out our build journal and steal from us all you'd like. I'm thinking specifically of the honeycomb floor and bonded "frame", which would save you work, weight, and complexity. Also, the torsion axle with radial tires is wonderful!

Seams it be faster to maker outer rings then infield

Hello Thomcat316,
First off thanks for the kind words about my teardrop design. It would be a slick trailer to build for sure. I use Fusion 360 for everything I design and build and it is a great software to use. Working with compound curves is possible in Fusion 360 but I have not had a need to work with this type of operation in some time. I would suspect that you would make a loft to produce the shape that you want on your design. To shell a part or design is very straight forward and you can setup how thick you want the finished part to be in the process again very easily. This would help a lot in making molds that you want for your design. I have been using Fusion 360 now for over three years and there are a lot of tutorials online to help you with your design needs or the learning process in general if you are just starting out with the software. If you have any further question about Fusion I would be more than happy to help you out.

First off thanks for the kind words about my teardrop design.

Did you build it?



Tony

Hi Tony,
No I have not had a chance to build my design simply because I do not have a vehicle that could tow it. Hard to tow this rig with my Min Cooper. I would also have to get back into the design and work out a lot of the interior details before I would consider getting into the build. No doubt that it would be a long build. A challenge to be sure but fun at the same time.