Currently in Vietnam for February 2018, and was hoping to find a bicycle to get around. So I tracked down a – perhaps only – fixed gear bike shop in Vietnam, and got familiar with the owner since we’re both enthusiasts. I then proceeded to crash my bike 2 days later, in a shameful display. The owner was kind enough to loan me a rear wheel while he fixed the other, and let me hang out and shared dinner while he fixed up my bike. To show my appreciation I wanted to make him an iPhone case with his bike shop’s logo on it.

Learned a lot of quick lessons in the process. I began with an existing simple iPhone case base, source here (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1814855). I learned that in Fusion 360 if you disable the work history, it will add a Mesh to BRep operation that can be performed on an STL file, to convert it into an object Fusion 360 can work with. From there, I took the images from his facebook profile (https://www.facebook.com/DANFixedGear/) and loaded them into Inkscape. Inkscape has a simple “Path” -> “Trace bitmap” option, that will try to make an SVG stencil from a high contrast photo. Once I had the SVGs it was a quick import into Fusion 360, then extruded into the case at varying depths for texture, and that was it.

I have to admit this went way faster than I expected. I initially thought I’d have to remodel a phone case off of an STL by hand, which would have been a miserable affair. It feels kind of guilty as well in the sense that I didn’t particularly do anything “creative” here, this was more a series of transformations than any sort of creation.

As it’s only a quick gift though I’m hoping he likes it.