Connect sheetmetal faces

[gwilson]

Hello all, I am a former Inventor user with a few months on ProE. My thanks to all who provide solutions on this forum as it has been very useful in my learning the software.

I have yet to find a way to connect two unattached sheetmetal faces as can be done in Inventor with the bend tool. I am designing the funnel shaped sheets for a grain hopper and would like to define the top connection and the bottom connection then join the two.

It's a 10 sec operation in Inventor but I don't see any similar functionality in ProE.

See below for the Inventor tool and my attempts with ProE using trapezoid flat. It's close but not precise and not adaptable.

Thanks

View attachment 4876


View attachment 4877

 

[jdurston]

This would be possible, but very difficult to do in ProE.

You would probably have to have a skeleton to prevent the assembly referencing problems between the parts. You can "join" unattached walls in ProE sheetmetal, but you're probably better off just modeling 2 attached walls and reference the brown and blue parts from an intermediary skeleton using Top-Down Design techniques. Or you can simply match up the sheetmetal z-form via modification in the assembly if you want to use a Bottom-Up modeling scheme.

I would say that this is one area where systems like Inventor have an advantage over ProE, because they have "design parts in the assembly" type tools. These types of functions were heavily demoed at the trade shows when they came out with them.