DE Cubicle Toy Design Contest: Finalist Mark Norwood in His Own Words

Editor’s Note: In early December 2011, DE invited readers and fans to submit their ideas for a cubicle toy. After the honorary judges have reviewed and scored more than 80 entries, three finalists emerged. Mark Norwood’s water-spraying Sherman tank is one of the finalists. Here is his final entry, along with an essay in his own words explaining the evolution of his design. He hopes to get not only the judges’ votes but yours too. To vote for Mark Nowrood’s design, visit DE’s Facebook fan page and click Like on this image.

Mark Norwood in his own words

When I read the description for this design contest, I knew this was the contest for me. I have always loved toys, and I love modifying them.

This idea all started with a Sherman Tank RC (remote-controlled) toy that was on the discount shelf at the local Radio Shack. It was sold, as is, for $5 and didn’t work. I have a saying: if it worked once I can make it work again. So I bought it, took it home, and repaired it.

I played with the tank for a couple of days, but quickly became bored with it. After all, how many times can you drive it over your shoe obstacle course or up book stack mountain? I put it on the shelf and forgot about it.

Sometime later I was looking through a surplus catalog and saw an interesting electric pump. The catalog said it was a windshield washer pump, but I suspect it was from an electric water gun. I ordered it just for fun. When it arrived, I was looking it over and an idea struck me: Wouldn’t it be fun to put it in the old tank? I gathered parts from another RC toy (that used a different frequency than the tank) and used one channel from the receiver to operate the pump. It was fun, but the only way to aim was to steer the tank. I had another channel available, so with some parts from the junk drawer, I motorized the turret of the tank so that I could aim from almost any position.

I took my modified tank to work and enjoyed wetting the pants legs of my unsuspecting coworkers. It was a hit as long as you weren’t one of the tank’s victims.

CAD Modeling

There were many challenges to modeling this assembly. The first is the age of my “workstation.” It is a 2004 Dell Dimension 8400 that I have worked hard to keep running. I have maxed out the memory (4MB), upgraded the processor (3.8 Gb/s Pentium 4 HT), and upgraded the video card (Nvidia GeForce GTX 470) and power supply  One of the reasons I am excited about this contest is that if I win, I will be able to replace my tired old friend.

Although I have done complex 3D models, most of the time I need fairly simple models to meet my clients’ needs. This particular model severely taxed my system and one part in particular, the tank body, (more than 170 features) caused the system to hang repeatedly and at one point the geometry failed and had to be recreated to recover the failing surfaces.

Some of the more interesting ways I used the CAD system was in modeling the tubes that connect from the fill port to the reservoir to the pump and finally to the spray nozzle. I wanted them to be faithful to the shape and routing of the original plumbing. I used a swept base along a 3D spline to create the tubes and Clearance Verification to correct the splines positions. I used the helix tool to set up a scaffolding for the  3D spline of the coiled tubing inside the turret.

I use SolidWorks 2012 Standard for much of my design work, and I used it for this project as well. I wanted to do a quality rendering of the model. Normally I would use AutoDesk Inventor to render the model, not because it is better, but because I have used it so long that I can quickly set up a scene. The problem was that the assembly was so complex that I would have to start over to do that, and there was no time.

I called my SolidWorks sales and service provider, Jamie Madura at Prism Engineering, Inc. to see if there was a way to easily convert the 3D file into something that Inventor could swallow without placing the components individually and that would preserve all the material and color attributes. I told him about the contest and the time constraints. He said he was pretty sure that we could convert the file and that he would get back to me.

Well, he did me one better. He hooked me up with a 15-day trial of SolidWorks 2012 Premium, so now there was no need to convert the files! Since I had already assigned the appearance to each of the parts, I could move right on to rendering the model. Only one problem, I had never used PhotoView 360, SolidWorks rendering add-on.

The rendering process proved to be fairly simple to set up, but with the slow speed of my computer renderings took anywhere from 1 to 2 hours.

I feel I got very good results and I look forward to everyone’s comments. I really enjoyed the challenge and I hope everyone enjoys the model. I am considering having the body parts 3D printed just to have them around to play with.

—Mark Norwood

Honorary judge Tony Lockwood, DE‘s editor at large, on Norwood’s design: I have a confession to make. All the designs were so good that I unilaterally decided to add one more criterion to the judging guidelines. To whit: Which Cubicle Toy would Steve Robbins, DE‘s executive editor, use to torment a coworker’s dog? See, Robbins kept a laser pointers in his desk, armed and ready for Jack Nelson to accompany his master to work. Three, four times a day, Steve would whip the thing out then laugh hysterically as Jack bounded about the normally staid halls of DE chasing the red dot. I call this extra-judicial metric the Robbins Razz.

With that in mind, Mark Norwood’s water-spraying Sherman tank passes the Robbins Razz—with an asterisk, which I’ll get to in a moment. Mark gets an A+ for already executing his design. Tank 2.0 can only be better. Mark also earns an A++ for his report that the tank wore out its welcome at his (former?) place of work. This news demonstrates the highest traits of a disruptive technologist, for which I salute Mark. One red flag for the later rounds of judging is Mark’s report that he redeployed the tank at home to chase the cats around (good) but “the dogs payed no attention to it at all” (eek). However, I’m serf to a cat and a pair of dogs, I’ll deem kitty chaffing a species-specific corollary of the Robbins Razz.

Honorary judge Josh Mings (SolidSmack) on Norwood’s design: Who wouldn’t want to have a tank in the office that shoot mustard? Oh wait, this one shoot water, but it could be adapted to shoot mustard.

To vote for Mark Nowrood’s design, visit DE’s Facebook fan page and click Like on this image.