Drawing 3D Springs with ZWCAD Professional

Generally, I use SolidWorks for finished 3D drawings and ZWCAD Standard for 2D drawings. But ZWSOFT indicates that ZWCAD Professional has basic 3D functions that are lacking in ZWCAD Standard. So I tried out the Professional version, and found that its solid editing and 3D operations are useful for fulfilling simple 3D solid model drawings.

Here is an example of how I used ZWCAD Professional to draw springs. The Torus, Slice, Rotate3D, and Union commands are required for this tutorial.

1.       From the View menu, select 3D Viewà SW Isometric.

2.       Enter the Torus command, and then specify the center of the torus at 0,0,0.
Specify the radius of whole torus as 200 units.
Specify the radius of body of torus as 20 units.
The result is a thin torus that looks like this:

3.       Start the Slice command, and then select the torus.
Choose the ZX section plane for slicing the torus in half: specify point 0,0,0 on the zx-plane.
Input B to save both sides.

 

4.       Selecting the origin of the UCS, move the UCS to the location indicated by the figure below:

5.       From the Modify menu, choose 3D Operation à Rotate 3D.
Select the left side of the torus to rotate.
Specify the y axis as rotation axis.
Specify point 0,0,0 on the y axis.
Specify a rotation angle of -8 degrees. (You can specify any rotation angle as you wish.)
The result is as below:

6.       Now start Copy command, and then select all objects to copy.
Select the red point (indicated in the follow figure) as the base point.
Select the yellow point (indicated in the following figure) as the second point to copy.
Repeat this operations several times, and then exit the command.

7.       Finally, use the Union command to combine all of these objects as one.

8.       Run the RenderFull command to get beautiful renderings of the completed spring.