3D spiral

Is there a way of extruding a circle or any shape along a 3D spiral.
Such as a coil spring or a handrail for a spiral staircase.
I have tried solids and surfaces but nothing works.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks
Richardb

 

Yes, get a different cad program. Turbocad will do that with great ease.

 

I have a few drawings done just send me the coordiantes needed i will be
able to come up with a dwg in cad 14 extension file

Regards

Rob

 

Rich, There is a way to do this in cad. Now, i havn't done this in a
while, but i can give you the basic concept. (for what its worth)

Fist off, create a circle at the desired radius/dia, use the trim
command to cut the circle in half.
now you need to rotate the ucs so that the Y axis is in the direction
of the former Z direction. Figure out the slope or angle in which the
spiral will accending. now rotate the half-circle so that it is angled
upward at the desired slope. now copy, and rotate the half-circle 180d
(using the original ucs) use osnaps to connect the two halves. (so
that they form a spiral)
once you have gotten the spiral at the approprite height and angle,
you need to change the ucs once again so that one of the endpoints
(top or bottom) is perpendicular with the ucs. after that all you need
to do is join all the line segments to creat one line. Create the
shape that the actual handrail "grip" looks like, and make it into a
region. Once it's a region, it's just a matter of extruding the shape
along a path, which would be the spiral.

I hope this helped a little more than telling you to buy new software.
Good luck!!!

Daniel Sandy

 

Say, why not to use a "Torus" tool from Solids toolbar to do that? Or draw a cross section of the desired handrail/spring and
use Revolve-->Slice-->Rotate-->Array-->Union set of commands? The only setback in all of these techniques is that the final
"spiral" is not helical one. But for most of the cases it is good enough.

Regards,

Igor.

 

This would give a helix not a spiral. (Constant diameter in Z direction.)

 

Wait.......that's what he asked for: a helix. But isn't there another
problem with this approach?
Don't you end up with an ellipse in plan?