Need to cut & place exact sized metal sheet before punching.
Any help will be appreciated.
Need to cut & place exact sized metal sheet before punching.
Any help will be appreciated.
Solidworks will make the flat pattern for you. Look at configurations after you have made the formed part. There will not be any extra configs. When you start a drawing the "flat pattern" is available to insert into the drawing. Once this is done you technically do not need the drawing any more. You then go back to your model and look at the configurations again. The flat pattern will appear. Note, if you have EPDM or pdm. You have to check out the model when starting the drawing to insert the flat pattern. If you do not check out the model. The configuration will appear after you insert the flat pattern into the drawing. But when you close the model, it will not save the configuration.
Dan Schleicher wrote:
Solidworks will make the flat pattern for you. Look at configurations after you have made the formed part. There will not be any extra configs. When you start a drawing the "flat pattern" is available to insert into the drawing. Once this is done you technically do not need the drawing any more.
And if you don't even want to mess with a drawing to just get a configuration for the flat pattern you can just do that manually. Create a new configuration for the flat pattern and in the feature tree suppress the Process Bends at the end of the list. Or in later versions of SWX the last feature is suppressed and called Flat-Pattern. Expand this and unsuppress its Flat-Patternx feature.
This will give you a flat pattern, but its accuracy is entirely up to the information you feed in: ACTUAL MEASURED material thickness, inside bend radius, K-factor, or whatever you are using to define the thickness and bend calculations.
SWX will generate an accurate flat pattern IF you give it accurate information to work with. I use K-factors developed from measurements of the actual materials and equipment we use (it can vary a great deal from one shop to another). Others use bend deductions, but they are still developed from the same measurements.