Hello,
I'm not familiar with creating drawings to have tubing bent, and consequently know very little about industry standards for dimensions and annotations. I'd appreciate if someone who's familiar with bending tubing has time to look at this and give some feedback. Is this okay? Maybe I should dimension to the centerlines instead? I'll probably send it to a fabricator for input also, but thought I'd get faster feedback here.
Thank you for the feedback. Is this better? In addition to the centerlines, it occurred to me that giving the dimensions of the straight sections might be more helpful than dimensioning to the Virtual Sharps. Any other suggestions, Scott, or anyone?
I've done a little tubing bending in the past... Give me Center-lines with dimensions, including the arc lengths or give me the flat length, then I would want the virtual sharp dimensions, working from right to left and bottom to top..
Hi Glenn, we have a tube bending machine, actually two so we output XYZ coordinates and show on the drawing point 1 and so on...
Steve C
So I should dimension to virtual sharps?
I'd say that's more a question for the operator of the tube bender. Here, we tell them the length of the straight portions, the radius and angle of the bends much like your post above. We also add some overall dimensions that help the operator verify the dimensions with some quick measurements.
a lot of tubing depends on the dia, and then the capabilities of the shop doing the bending.
we have a chart for min bend radius. then a min straight length.
1/4 min r =.69
3/8 .159
1/2 .156
5/8 2.11
3/4 2.58
7/8 3.04
1 3.70
Then depending on how complicated the part ends up...dim to centerlines.
most of our tubing is just a dumb model that we add 5 ft to in the bom and the shop gets pictures showing the tubing threw clamps, and around stuff. and teeing off to other locations. Mostly where to start and where they need to end up and things sometimes turn out better than what we modeled and if not we say why did you not follow the model .
usually you put a centerline through the tube and dimension off the cl.