I did this model in a few hours, people have commented how skillful I must be to have accomplished this feat... Bull Hockey! You can do it too! First, just because something looks complex doesn't mean it really is. Break it down into smaller parts. Let's start where I started... In this case I had the object in my hand, and a small ruler, but you can use an image, blue prints, or any other reference data. OK, I started with the Cylinder, so I made a long spline with snap to grid turned on and counted out how many "cooling fins" I needed and ended up with the spline shape on the left. To be sure the CPs didn't drift while drawing the spline I selected all of them and right clicked to select "snap to grid." From my observation of the real life sample, I saw the outer edges of the cooling fins had an increasingly larger diameter near the top. So...
By selecting all the CPs in green and selecting the rotator tool, I adjusted the pivot and gave them a little rotation, then followed right up with a few cursor key up arrows. I am assuming you have done (and understood) my earlier tutorials, so I am not going to expressly explain every step this time. With some other adjustments I ended up with a spline shape on the right and ready to lathe (move the spline away from the axis some, then lathe). Re-do if needed and adjust to taste... Now you have a good starting point! Let's look at an exploded view and see how simple primitives are copy, pasted, rotated and scaled to get approximately 70% done...
Make one beveled cube from Yves's
Tutorial, and copy it twice, rotate and scale as needed, then move them
into position.
Make a tube (4 or 8 cross sections via lathe) and make losta copies and scale,
rotate, and move those into position. Getting the idea? Really easy...
Make a 4 point rendering patch and extrude it, then peak all the points, copy,
etc.. & stretch them as needed. (Blue labeled in above image.)
Make a kewl looking hexnut and copy as needed. I made a TrueType font that worked
really well and gave me these parts... which you can
freely use.
All the stuff circled in red use one nut type or the other.
