A parametric mannequin for FreeCAD

I am toying with the idea of building a car. Check out Cyclekarts, they are a small and simple go-kart-like vehicle styled like ~1920s sports cars. Most importantly, check out Geoff May's "Maybug", which is road legal!

How cool is that?

But I don't want to build a cyclekart as such, they are a bit too small and underpowered. Geoff's cyclekart is road legal under the "heavy quadricycle" classification, which is way easier than full car spec, the main requirements being to stay under 450kg (under 250kg if you don't want seatbelts), and under 20hp, and then you get regulated more like a motorbike instead of a car.

Cyclekart engines are generally under 10hp so I would find something better. And cyclekarts are normally single-seaters and ideally I would like to have room for 2.

Anyway, I wanted to mess about in FreeCAD and see what sort of size and layout would work, and I found that I didn't have a good idea of how big it would need to be to fit people inside it.

So I have made a mannequin for FreeCAD. Get it on github.

It is based on the "average male" dimensions from this diagram that I found online.

You can change the dimensions of the body using the "S" Spreadsheet in the model, and reposition the limbs by selecting one of the LinkGroups in the tree (they are named with "Joint" suffix) and rotating using the Transform tool.

You will want to use at least FreeCAD 1.1 otherwise the Transform tool rotates about the centroid instead of the origin.

Here is my mannequin contorted to fit on the toy tractor:

If you want to use it, I recommend save a local copy of mannequin.FCStd, edit the dimensions to suit your body if required, and then copy and paste him into whatever projects you want mannequins in.

There are other FreeCAD mannequins available, in particular Mannequin_mp from the FreeCAD library. But I didn't manage to find one that can have the joints posed without laboriously having to relocate everything downstream of that joint so that it stays connected.