SOLIDWORKS Design Challenge: Build a Cupcake Stand

Recently I got married, during the planning stages my fiancee and I were looking for ways (often subtle) to incorporate elements of our lives into the details of our wedding. As such, I tried to find a way to integrate SOLIDWORKS into our wedding. I could feel the most difficult part of this design challenge was going to be finding something to design. Thankfully, she soon saw a stepped cake stand that worked with cupcakes. Since such things are massively expensive when people add the “wedding surcharge,” we opted to design and build our own. Thankfully, my father-in-law is handy at building things and I have the best design software at my fingertips.

Undertaking my SOLIDWORKS Design Challenge

I got to work designing it. The initial design was circular, but we soon realized that this wouldn’t allow us to do the cupcake pattern design that we wanted. So, I started modeling up a square one. With the circular attempt, I created a series of planes and sketched a circle on each one. For this one, I wanted to try something different. I started with the square plate for my top step, then patterned it down:

Start of Cake Stand design

Then I opted to use the Move Face command to modify the size of the patterned instances. I couldn’t use Instances to Vary for this application, since it is a multibody part, and I’ve never used Move Face for a real-world application before. For those of you not aware, Move Face can be found under the Direct Editing tab of the Command Manager:

Using Move Face feature

Completed design

I continued with Boss-Extrudes and Cut-Extrudes until the design was complete:

Completed Cupcake Stand

(The sketch lines represent the area of table we needed for the cupcakes unable to fit on the stand. My father-in-law actually created a 4’x4′ sheet and nailed it to the bottom once we were on-site)

Still, I wasn’t yet done with the design. As I tend to design things that are cantilevered, I wanted to confirm where the centre of mass was.

Determining the centre of mass

Using the design at our wedding

Of course, when I tried asking the baker questions like “How much pressure do we need to apply to the knife when we cut the cake?” I was unable to get answers, so it’s a good thing we attached it to a base. Anyways, here is the finished result in real-life:

Cupcake stand at my wedding