Hi there,
I am currently designing an outlet for a piece of equipment and I am having issues converting the piece to its flat pattern. This is the final product:
I am attempting to select the sheet metal piece which is a section cut from pipe in solidworks. I want to then convert the piece to its flat pattern so that I can convert it to a dxf and cut it from sheet metal on plasma cam. The following are the steps to creating the first version I attempted that worked in the program just fine:
This is the first cut in the sheet metal pipe. This angle is what determines the height of the piece when attached to the outlet. The second/final cut is simply a right angle to the original cut that also passes through the vertex of the part:
The next step is to simply unfold:
Now this works great as you can see. The issue comes when I want to increase the height of the outlet to allow for more airflow. Below are the following steps:
The height of this piece is just over 1.4, whereas the base is the normal length of 1.25 (though not labelled in this picture). The next picture is the issue I am facing:
It appears that something to do with the dissymmetry between the lengths is preventing the part from being unfolded. Any thoughts on how to skirt this issue?
Thanks!
This type of sheet metal cut has been a tough one for SW, try this;
In the right plane, (I'm assuming the first picture is from the right side), draw a small rectangle for a cut extrude, (you only need like .001"), you need to go through all both directions, that cut edge is what you select for the sheet metal feature..