a little thing to know about sheet metal...

Hi all,

I discovered something interesting today using the unfold and fold commands
on a sheet metal part. (excuse if this has been mentioned before)

I needed to flatten a curved face out to locate some holes on that face so
I unfolded the part and because I'm lazy I usually just click the 'collect
all bends' button.

In this case however, after folding back up the part I had errors in my
assembly. Investigation revealed that after being re-folded vertical and
horizontal elements of the sheet metal had been rebent inaccurately.

The errors were in the range of 0.00000018° from vertical or horizontal but
that is more than enough to blowup any mates or in-context relations to
those edges or faces.

In this case I solved the problem by only unfolding the single curved face
I needed.

Zander

 

I've noticed the exact same problem too. What I use as a rule when I need to
flatten anything, only flatten what you need to, to accomplish what you're
doing.

Richard