OBDF 210: Reverse Engineered Object (Progress 1)

Hello and welcome back to my blog! This week the class is working on digitizing our chosen objects and trying to be as precise as possible using our digital calipers. I started this out by taking some of the most important measurements, including length of the certain pieces I wanted to break this down into    

For this first step, I decided to try and approach this reconstruction using inspiration from the 3d technical drawing homework and start the construction by making a top-down view blueprint of the left arm.

A somewhat accurate first representation of the arm done, had a wild time trying to get the pieces properly joined.

I'm currently having a horrible time trying to figure out how to best represent/model/measure these shapes. They are proving to be quite challenging and tricky, and after some first tries, I know this is going to require some more attention.

Mirror'd the first arm after fixing all the joining issues and trimming all the shapes I made (and making sure that the shapes were accurately within the measurements I was taking of the original object.

After all my careful planning and deliberate joining, I was still running into issues with the surface of the body that I was designing and I think I'll likely have to reapproach trying this out from another method. I need a better way to represent the dimensionality of the cylindrical shapes that manifest along the lengths of these shapes. 

(As you can see, the extrusion wasn't working properly and the surface was left uncapped.) The original plan was to approach this and chamfer or loft the surface but I think I will need to approach this from a different design perspective. At least I have most of the measurements I will need in order to do this, and I still have an idea of what the overall object will start to look like. 

This is the planning/drawing of the secondary arm/peg winder. I had a hard time trying to fillet the corners so this shape will probably end up getting reworked, and based on the photos above of the challenging geometry of this object in 3d, I will probably try to tackle this from a different perspective rather than the side.