Gibbs and Associates announced that Blue Chip Engineering, Ramsey, Minn., has engineered and machined a mobile sculpture using SolidWorks CAD software and CAM software from GibbsCAM.

The sculpture’s upper sphere is 8" in diameter with a wall thickness of ¼" and has 1,100 holes of 16 different sizes. 

On June 6, 2012, the sculpture, designed by artist Tom Shannon, will be awarded as a prize to the winner of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, an annual international design competition that provides a $100,000 prize “to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems,” Gibbs and Associates said in a statement.

The sculpture, which comprises two spheres, has been the most challenging of the Shannon sculptures, said Blue Chip founder Rick Denny in the statement. “The upper sphere is 8" in diameter with a wall thickness of¼", has 1,100 holes of 16 different sizes, and is designed to rotate or spin on a shaft attached through roller bearings to the supporting lower, 4"-diameter sphere,” he said in the statement.

Shannon wanted the sculpture to perform as an interactive optical instrument, which required the internal and external surfaces to be mirrors, which would reflect the environment. To create the relationship to geodesic polyhedrons scientific designer Joe Clinton developed a pattern of holes on a CAD system to achieve the effect, according to the statement.

Denny transferred the design into SolidWorks to create a solid model, duplicate the hole pattern across the spherical surface, use mass properties to physically balance components and provide machinable models for programming a 5-axis machine tool with GibbsCAM.

GibbsCAM has a utility called Hole Manager, which simplifies and automates hole-making operations, which can often be achieved with three mouse clicks, the company reported. Hole Manager automatically recognizes holes by characteristics assigned within SolidWorks, puts a point at the center of each hole, and provides a normal vector to the hole. The points and normal vectors are used by GibbsCAM to program the proper tool rotation to perform the specified hole operations, such as boring, drilling, tapping and countersinking.

Moorpark, Calif.-based Gibbs and Associates, a Cimatron company, is the developer of GibbsCAM software for programming CNC machine tools.

Posted June 4