Hello everyone,

I am a student member of an SAE Baja team. We have a 4 axis plasma table on the way that should be able to do our tube notching off of the cad models. In order to do so we need a flattened or unrolled version of the tubes that can then be exported as a DXF file. Below are images of an example tube and the desired result. We have already figured this out in Inventor, and a member on that forum pointed out that the cutter will always be perpendicular to the tube when it is cutting. There is a link below where you can see the solution they came up with in Inventor. I have also attached an example tube sldprt file.

Can anyone help me with this? I tried using a similar method as we did in Inventor, but I can't even convert the tube to sheet metal correctly.

If it makes a difference, we have the student version of Solidworks 2016-2017.

Thanks in advance!

Solved: Creating flat drawing of tube - Autodesk Community