Hi
I'm trying to flatten a body that I've created to bring into a drawing as a developed elevation. The part is a large Retaining Wall Structure and needs to be dimensioned and marked up in developed views within drawings. I have used aligned section views in the past but they are not ideal for most of the geomtries I tend to work with, which inlude a mixture of curves and straights
I originally created a solid feature and then converted it to sheet metal before flattening it. I've managed to do this, but the issue I'm getting is that the flattened length is greater than the actual solid feature length when adding the total length of each base line, should be 100m. When converting to sheet metal, is there a way of keeping the angled corners of the solid feature rather than having radiuses? I'm assuming this is the reason why the lengths differ!!
I've used the sheet metal method as this is the only one I'm aware of and its the first time I've used it!
Is there a better way or another method that I could use to get the flattened length to be the same as the base line lengths used to create the initial solid body?
Any help would be much appreciated? I've attached the part if someone has any ideas!
Thank you
Ioan
Good afternoon,
I am assuming that the SolidWorks flat pattern is developed the similar to the old handbooks and that is they use the centerline of the thickness and bend radius calculations.
One idea that I would try is make the thickness .001 mm and the radius .001 mm, that should get you really close to the proper linear dimensions.
Personally I would lay out the panels how they would be built and forget about the bending stuff, treat it as an individual panel,
Later,
John