How Would You Make This Pattern?

In modeling a dune buggy, I came across these big paddle sand tires. Tire treads are notoriously difficult, but these take it a step further. How would you go about making a tread like this?

Here’s how I did it. I’m not saying this is right, it’s just how I did it the first shot, without going back to correct anything. The tire was not the main point of this exercise, but it brings up a lot of questions along the way.

I started by extruding and then trimming a curved surface radially out from the tire, which was a solid.

Then I thickened the surface to make it solid. My instinct was to make the paddle a surface body, and then pattern that around, but that’s cumbersome.

As an aside, in Solid Edge you can copy a set of faces and integrate them into a solid very easily. I think they call the technique detached faces or something like that. In ‘Works, you can do the pattern with faces, but then you have to trim and knit the bodies into a surface body, you can’t just integrate directly into a solid. Well, you could thicken the patterned bodies, but that leaves you with a void in the middle of each paddle.

‘Works would let you pattern the faces (which is an underused option), which essentially does the same thing as Edge integrating the surface bodies, except that I also needed to mirror and then rotate the original body before patterning. ‘Works will not let you do these extra steps

After thickening, I added a few fillet features (being sure to throw in my new favorite, the asymmetrical fillet). And then I hacked the tire up with some surface bodies and the Intersect feature so that I captured the paddle as a single solid body.

The Intersect feature is something I’m gaining more and more respect for. You could do this without the Intersect, but it would involve many more steps.

Then I mirrored and rotated the body so that I had two opposing paddles made from chunks of the tire.

Then I patterned the pair of bodies, which gives you a wild looking rats nest of stuff.

Then I combined the patterned bodies back with the original tire to make it all look like the original. And then of course I had to use Combine to boolean it all back together. And of course I had to add the Dezignstuff logo.

There has to be a better way to do this. Does anyone have an idea of how to more easily accomplish the mirror/pattern without all of the body hacking?