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mating up tricky bend corners

Fuergrissa

New member
Hello, I'm not a pro, I've only had one class on solidworks and have no experience with sheet metal tools until tonight. Trying to help a buddy design a bumper for his truck and I like the idea of using SM tools to design the bumper, then unfold it in order to have a design for the plasma table.

In any case I'm hung up, so I'll try to explain my part, then I have a pic of the napkin drawing I'm working off of and the SW file I am working on.

I started by sketching in the top plane the profile I want then made that a base flange. On the front plane I don't want the bumper flat from left to right, but somewhat similar to a smiley face, so I did a sketch of material I wanted remove and extrude cut. Now for the tricky part. Even though there are only straight edges between each bend, the upper and lower edges are not flat across in any dimension, so when I go to do an edge flange across the entire top or bottom at 45deg I have many overlaps, or edges that are spread apart. As I go to complete the edge flange I get an error about bend overlap, but it will still build with errors. when I select trim bends however, it will not even build. so I go about trying to clean up where the edge flanges are supposed to meet, however wihen I try to close the corners, they still won't meet up, presumably because the bends are on different axis. where the edge flanges overlap I also have the same problem where I cannot get them to meet up properly.

I would really appreciate some help or advice. I don't think my design is complex by any means, but I really need the sheet metal tools to figure out the angles I need to cut into the plate so that they will line up close after they are bent.

part file

2011-03-31_051804_bumper.zip

can't get the picture to upload yet, will edit post when I do, but it probably won't be much help anyway.

Thanks in advance, I'd really like to figure this out, not just to finish this, but for future knowledge also. thanks.
 
So I finished the part, I was able to model it all as sheetmetal pretty decently. Unfortunately, It still has the error "this part intersects itself after bend operation" on each of the edge flange features. Unfortunately this makes it so that I cannot get the flat pattern which was the whole reason for doing this. If somone has time to look at this I'd really appreciate it. The error makes it sound like an issue with my bend radius or something similar, but playing with the values I can't seem to get it any better.

The part is 1/8in plate, and bending on an 1/8in radius with .5 k value and a rectangular relief.

Here is the updated file:


2011-04-01_040055_bumper.zip
 
Try that:

UNFOLD the part.
EXTRUDE - CUT what you need
FOLD the part.
(UNFOLD and FOLD are tools for Metal Sheet - see the manager)

If UNFOLD do not work, I think that you change the sketch for EDGE FLANGE.
Do not do this if it is not strongly necessary. Use EXTRUDE BOSS to put material at the corners. It is more to work but the results are good.

I don't open your part, so I hope that I understand well your problem.

Good luck !
 
You will need to add the flanges one by one, after you have place the first flange edit the sketch to angle the edge which will interfere with the next flange, (you will need to delete the verical relation the line has and add an angle dimension)because you are bending on diferent planes the angles and lengths of each flange will be slightly different, if you want the weld join to be equal you will have to edit both ends of each flange, it's a long way round but its the only way I could get it to work.


Hope this helps
 

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