Calculating length of a wire product

Take a U-shaped wire, bent from 10 mm O.D. stainless steel.
You model it as a swept extrusion or a pipe (solid) and when finished,
you calculate the required length to cut from your stock material, either
by doing the geometry math yourself or by creating an evalute feature.
Either way you end up with the same answer, 3 straight lengths and 2 quarter
circles.

If you model the same part but now as a square (10x10 mm) section and then
declare it as
a sheetmetal part you can get the required length by using a flat pattern
feature.
When a sheet metal part is bent, it stretches and therefore, which ProE
recognizes, the total
length required is less than the "geometrical answer" above.
Its obvious that in reality, the wire stretches when bent just like a strip
of sheeet metal and that
therefore the second smaller answer is correct.

Now, does anybody know a way of getting a "flat pattern" answer without
having to redo the part
in square form. This redo can get complicated if there are more bends to the
wire that are not all in the same
plane.

Bertil

 

I just killfiled him. No more stupidity.

Dave

 

How does one "killfile" a poster (I assume this results in you not
being forwarded anything by them any more?) ?
I am poking around the google group site here and not seeing a switch
that looks like that...

So tired of sifting through all this yelling John Banquer chaff to get
the good bits of advice out

Thx

Magnus

 

Killfile is a generic term meaning use whatever filter your newsreader
has to delete the garbage posts. JB is very easy because he posts under
the same user name (newsreader softwares still aren't sharp enough to
filter based on the stupidity of the content)

I'm using Mozilla Thunderbird and it's pretty easy to set up a Filter to
delete particular messages. I poked around google groups and found no
such features. However, I did flag all of JB's threads as spam, so if
others do the same maybe we can collectively vote the threads into
oblivion or something.

David