McDonalds-Themed Office Supplies

Summary: Typical office stationary is lackluster and boring. Level up your office supply game with McDonald's themed ones! What could be better than having Grimace sharpen your pencils, storing your USBs in a soft drink, holding your pens and pencils along with the fries, or hiding your pushpins and paper clips in the iconic Big Mac !?

This guide will cover how to make the Grimace-Pencil Sharpener

I worked on this project with Aly Taha and you can visit his profile to see how we made the other parts. 

Lesson Plan + Activity: In this project my partner and I were tasked with designing a set of themed office supplies using SolidWorks software. The end goal was to create complex and interesting 3d models whilst developing our collaboration and 3D modeling skills in the SolidWorks software.

Assembly/Construction Instructions: 

See ‘DAHA Grimace Toy Planning Doc-1.pdf’ 
 

Once you have your pieces printed follow these steps.

1. Take the body, Grimace_Body.3mf, and the left and right legs, Grimace_LLeg and Grimace_Rleg. Insert each leg into the slots at the bottom of the body.

2. Take the left arm, Grimace_LArm, and insert into the slot on the left side when looking at the body from the front.

3. Take the right arm, Grimace_RArm, and insert it into the right slot.

4. Take the mouth, Grimace_Mouth, and insert it into the mouth slot.

5. Take each of the eyes, Grimace_LEye and Grimace_REye, and insert them into their corresponding eye slots.

6. Take your insertable pencil sharpener and insert it into the slot from the top so that the hole is on the top and the shaving come out into the back opening. For this project we used this pencil sharpener. You can also use any pencil sharpener that measures less than 11mm by 15mm by 30mm in size.

Design Choices:

1. Pencil Sharpener Cutout

Originally we were going to have the pencil sharpener opening be in the toy's mouth with the pencil shaving coming out the back. This would've been a cool feature, however, it would be structurally problematic without spending a lot of time going back and re-doing the model to make it stable. 
 

In the end, the design we went with was more simple to implement and easier to use during assembly.
 

2. Guide curves

In solidworks, when using the loft feature, it is not required to use guidecurves. Theoretically, you could use a lot of reference planes and sketches to get the exact shape you want. However, we found that using a guide curve a long with a reasonable amount, 8-10, sketch planes worked the best for getting a good shape for the model of the body. 

When we tried using the sketch planes on their own, the shape of the body wasn't fluid and didn't feel real. Additionally, when we used the bottom plane and top plane along with the guide curve only, it tended to cause problems. Thus, we used the best of both.