Orbital Riveting

[dr_gallup]

We have a number of parts that get deformed during assembly by an orbital riveting process where a thin revolved section is progressively bent inward to capture the other parts of the assembly.

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My usual technique for making these involves cutting away the material to be bent and then adding a revolved protrusion in the bent form at the part level. I then use family tables to have bent and unbent instances of the part. I also have to have family tables of the assemblies with bent and unbent instances. In some cases, there is more than one riveting and they may occur at different assembly levels leading to a lot of family table instances.

Is there a better way? I have seen some discussion of spinal bends but I don't think one can be used here? What about toroidal bends? The Pro/E help is pitiful on these advanced features. I would prefer to apply the bend feature at the assembly level to avoid having the elaborate family tables.

Also, what level of licensing is necessary to make spinal bends? I don't seem to be able to even find a grayed out menu pick for spinal bends. We have Foundation and AAX, no surfacing and it is the old foundation, not the new one.

 

[mgnt8]

from what you describe, toroidal bendsounds more likely to be the answer than spinal bend, although I'm not sure how you do it when your deformation involves removing and adding material.


I can answer your second question though. The advanced features will not even show up grayed out or otherwiseunless you set the config.pro option ALLOW_ANATOMIC_FEATURES to YES. After you do that you'll immediately see them with the basic package. You're right when you say advanced features have limited documentation so keep us posted on how this works out.

 

[dr_gallup]

I have ALLOW_ANATOMIC_FEATURES set to YES, I still don't see any spinal bend menu pick.

I have my doubts about torodial bends being able to do this. The limited help only shows taking a flat part and bending it in 2 directions simultaneously. I have a revolved shape that I want to bend.

 

[mgnt8]

It looks like you want it to bend your part all around a circular section. A spinal bend will only bend your part along a plane so it won't work.