oil engine from the 'old' days
 

im trying to make one of those old oil engines. i want to animate it and use particles ect, lighting, blah blah.

i made (as usual) a heap of small snaps which i think say more than i do.

start with the CV curve tool

that was the curve i used to make this as a revolved surface m select the curve and (surfaces.., revolve)

i used a lot of curve pionts to make the ridge in it

same deal with the base, went in and changed the profile a little to my taste before i revolved the CV curve

and now i got this

same for the chimney.., a revolved surface

but now for something slightly differant.., i created a nurbs cylinderm making sure there was no caps on in the options

i adjusted the size by eye (the whole thing is by eye except for the photo I'm looking at) and pushed it into the body of the engine so i can fillet it later

and i right clicked to get the context menu and selected 'hulls.'

i selected the seond row from the bottom and scaled it into the 'valve' (the nurbs cylinder)

then selected the row below and 'shift' selected the row above and scaled them both together in 'Y'

until i got a ridge like this

i closed off the top by selecting the top hull and scaling it in

until it looked like this

of course with nurbs one needs to be aware of something called tangency and so in the side view i se;ected the top hull and ...

pulled it down until it was at the same level as the hull below it