We make a lot of display elements out of 6mm EPVC sheet using dados and V-grooving. I have figured out a pretty good way to accurately create these parts and get usable flat patterns. I have started running into an issue that happens only on occasion and for the life of me i cannot figure out. I unfold my part, add necessary features, and when i fold my part again it completely changes the orientation despite having the same surface selected as i did in the unfold feature.
Process:
- I start out with .050 sheet metal and a bend radius of .001 because we cut our V-grooves down to a remaining thickness of .05 and heat bend the parts.
- unfold part, and make a sketch with lines offset .001 from the bend radius and extrude all surfaces .186 to get a 6mm part
- add a .186 @ 45 degree chamfer to the edges around the bend lines to create a "V-groove"
- add Dados, corner relief for router bits, cut outs etc.
- Fold part.
In all cases this works great. i get a 6mm "sheet metal" part with v-grooves and accurately fitting dados that i can generate flat patterns off of, but 10-15% of the time the part changes orientation. which is only detrimental in that is a hassle in making an assembly and that it is perplexing me.
If anyone has any thoughts or insight it would be much appreciated.
David
Hi David,
I had a look at your file and it looks like the "fixed face" gets "mutilated" by all the cuts, chamfers and extrudes and with it, it changes the alignment. It seems to me that Solidworks usually picks the largest face in order to determine the flat pattern direction and with all the features added in the folded state this "fixed face" becomes very small and seems to change its direction in space.
When you suppress all features except the first base flange feature, then edit the flat pattern feature you will see the fixed face highlighted in the graphics area.
When you do the same thing without suppressing all features you will see that there is only one small piece of the selected face remaining and it has a different orientation in space. So I guess that with all those features applied the initial face ID changes and this causes the wrong alignment.
However this is just my guess and you should submit this problem to your reseller who will likely forward it to our support that will look into this issue. Depending on their findings you will either get a response what the issue is and how you can fix it or you will get a SPR which is the confirmation that this is a software problem and has to be fixed by development (unfortunately without a specified time frame when it will be fixed).
Hope this helps.
Kind regards
Frank
Solidworks Product Definition Team