I need help constructing a complicated sheet metal part. Ultimately I need a long piece of .006" sheetmetal rolled into a spiral with a .1" pitch. Inside that one inch pitch I require a small sinusoidal sheet metal pattern. I have tried to do this many ways. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Message was edited by: Eric Greenwell
I uploaded the part....It was much prettier before. I tried doing a lofted sheet metal extrusion, flattening it and putting the sinusoid on the flat before re rolling. I tried surface extrusion, thickening, creating a solid waveform and creating a curve driven pattern. none of which were successful and the last one wouldnt complete construction because of CPU usage I assume. It was rather labor intensive.
I got it to work the way SW wants to work it, no splines on lofted bends ....
So I did short straight lines with a radius between the lines and extruded the part and added sheet metal - This would definitely work, however to do it the right way see the link Jeremy posted
Thanks for the help John. I was originally using the space inbetween the lines because I wanted to use the line as a wrapping metal. i realized later that I would just need to create a new spiral for that. The issue I am having now is that the patterned segments begin to mesh real well, but as it propagates you can see the mismatch at the outer rings.
I plan on doing some analytical modeling with this so i would prefer it not be there. If I have to live with it for now that is fine. What I want to do though is create a sketch of this face so I can extrude it faster. Everytime I try to change anything now, the model freezes because it is too labor intensive. Easy way to create a sketch from this face? Converting entities will not allow me to select the chain and only one segment is selected at a time.
The mis-match in the outer ring could be your computer graphics..
As for converting the entities, yes that is a slow process.
Do you have the part modeled as shown in the picture? Could you upload it ?