Sheet Metal - Bend Order (?) Advice / Opinions

Hello everyone.

I need some advice on the Sheet Metal "Bend Order".

Does anyone know why sheet metal bends have "bend order"?

Does anyone use these for a practical purpose / is there one?

Does anyone have any ideas on what actually happens when the bend
order is changed (outside of the obvious renumbering)?

I'm trying to get an idea of why these are available to the user. The
help file is not too helpful. This seems like a non-useful feature,
or at least it is not clearly useful at first glance.

Maybe for use in a 3rd party app / macro (?).

Thanks for you advice.

Regards -

SMA

 

Hi all,

That is one question I wanted to ask!

However, my guess would be that one can make a drawing
illustrating a sequence of bends resulting in a finished
component using appropriate configurations etc.

I also assume that SW will sometime in the future develop
this feature...

Regards,

mvk

 

It used to be that you would get an error that said the piece intersects
itself during bend operations, even though it was ok when flat and ok when
fully formed. This was a particular problem with something like weld tabs.
If you form the weld tab and the side of the box that the tab was on first,
you wouldn't be able to form the adjacent side of the box because that side
would have to go through the tab. It just meant that if you performed the
bends in that particular order, the part would run into itself while it was
being formed. I only remember using the bend order setting in the "old"
way of doing sheetmetal, and haven't had a use for it in a few years.

matt