If I need to made a sheet metal part using the midplane of its thickness, I usually use the midpoint of one of its edges or create a plane on that point and use that for mating. This brings me to my question. Why isnt a midplane created automatically when generating a sheet metal part?
Well, its good practice to design a part where it uses one of the F/T/R planes as its midplane so you can use later for mating. What makes sheet metal different than a standard extrude is you dont have the option to do a midplane extrude.
You can get around this limitation by creating a thin extrude and then inserting bends. I would imagine this would not work for all sheet metal parts but it is usually how I do it and it works pretty well.
Ryan W.
Only if the design is suited to mid-plane creation, is it good practice to do so, but even then that would be for width or length or height ... not material thickness. I don't believe I have ever needed to mate the mid-plane-thickness of a sheet metal part. It has always been to an actual face.
Chris M wrote:
Well, its good practice to design a part where it uses one of the F/T/R planes as its midplane so you can use later for mating. What makes sheet metal different than a standard extrude is you dont have the option to do a midplane extrude.
see attached for 2 examples of mid-plane extrude.
setting the thickness to mid-plane is not very usefull.
@Kenneth
I am referring to the TOP plane on your Sheetmetal_Mid-Plane.SLDPRT model. The midplane of material thickness. I guess im the minority when it comes to mating to 1/2 material thickness. Another way is to use the width command, pick both faces of the sheet metal, then 2 faces on the other part, but its more steps...
Regardless, I have a macro to create a midplane of the thickness. Just throwing the topic out there...
I practice and preach creating models based on midplanes - always create as midplanes unless there is a reason not to.
Now, that being said, I don't know that I have ever wanted to use a sheet metal part with a mid plane to the material thickness. A sheet metal part is measured to outside or inside mold points and is probably located or used relative to a face or holes. For these reasons I have never desired to have a plane at the mid of the thickness. How would you handle that if the part has no flat faces? A fully curved sheet metal part can be created and flattened. The "mid plane" would not be a plane at all - it would have to be a surface.
I guess I would have to see an example of why it would be desirable.
WT
Here is an example: the orange stud could be mated coïncident to the right assy plane if it had a midplane halfway its thickness.
Now a distance mate is needed, which can lead to mistakes if the sheet thickness is changed lateron in the design process.
Sometimes I create a midplane myself for this reason with an equation to the thickness.
Simply use Width Mate
@Deepak Gupta
Width mate requires 4 faces.
@Jan Van Leeuwen
Dont use a distance mate or equation, thats bad practice.
Simply pick one of the edges and create a plane using its midpoint.
Jan posted a good example of what im talking about. Not all sheet metal parts have bends
Chris M wrote:
@Deepak Gupta
Width mate requires 4 faces.
Yes, you can use two faces of Sheet metal part and two of the base plate (if it is similar to Jan's example)
@Chris,
Simply pick one of the edges and create a plane using its midpoint.
Learned something today ;-)
Thats what I said in my first post
I mainly posted this because I think its something SolidWorks should do automatically. Yea, maybe I need to submit a feature request.
Chris,
With respect to your request: maybe it is enough that the sheet metal feature has a button to be able to select that the sketch is extruded symmetrically. Just like the selection buttons of the belt/chain feature.
I presume you mean the orange gusset. In this case I would not make the gusset a sheet metal part - a simple midplane extruded part would suffice. And yes, a midplane here would be very appropriate and proper. But I can also imagine that some places make all flat parts sheet metal whether they have bends or not, or a config may have bends and another config has the bends suppressed.
WT
Why should it be created automatically? What makes a sheet metal part any different then any other part, that it needs mid-plane to be created automatically.
Just curious as to why you think this needs to be this way. I very, very rarely create mid plane extrudes for any parts I model.
Cheers,
Anna