Bend/Trim/Rotate/Unbend/Measure

[Bob La Londe]

I am looking for a way to design a cut for a sheet of material. The sheet would be bent along a curve, rotated a set number of degrees, and then trimmed along two planes. One parallel and one perpendicular to the original plane. The idea is to be able to take the resulting piece and pull the dimensions off of it to determine how to cut it from a flat piece of sheet.

[Perfpunch]

Can you post a sketch of what you're after and I'll see if it will come out of Inventor. I can't imagine what you're describing but Inventor has some neat tricks for sheet metal and can certainly place cuts through formed features or unfold features allowing a known cut to give a resultant cutout.

Edit:

Another option would be to construct the model using surfaces, these could then be thickened to give a sheet.

[Bob La Londe]

Here is a slideshow of the basic process showing what I hope to acheive.

ImageShack(TM) slideshow

I'ld like to be able to get the 2d flat dimensions of that surface indicated by the line in the final picture. The idea is to be able to create the shape in CAD, get the dimensions of the piece and transfer them to flat stock in the real world and cut the resulting curves in the sheet before bending the sheet to match the desired curve of its plane.

In the CAD we bend, rotate, trim, get dimensions.

In real life we layout dimensions, trim, rotate into position, and bend.

[Perfpunch]

Hi Bob,

That all seems simple enough, I don't have any experience of turboCAD, will it not develop a solid into sheet form?

We can do this a couple of ways, if you can create the solid I can develop it into a flat pattern or give me a drawing and I'll draw it up and flat pattern it. Because of the cuts made at angles this will cause the material to require bevelling or is the sheet so thin that it won't matter?

Perf

[Bob La Londe]

Hi Bob,

That all seems simple enough, I don't have any experience of turboCAD, will it not develop a solid into sheet form?

We can do this a couple of ways, if you can create the solid I can develop it into a flat pattern or give me a drawing and I'll draw it up and flat pattern it. Because of the cuts made at angles this will cause the material to require bevelling or is the sheet so thin that it won't matter?

Perf

The idea I am working on is for a welded sheet application. It actually works out better to just cut to the dimension of the desired face and let the weld fill in the wedge between sheet edges. I was hoping to find a way to do this myself because I am going to have to do quite a bit of experimentation with it to get all the pieces right. Right now the only 3D Cad I have is ViaCad 2d/3d so I'm limited.

A beveled cut would actually not work out as well I don't think.

I guessed that sheets might be a better way to form this, but I just started learning how to work with sheets. The solid in the illustration was faster and easier for me to generate to demonstrate the idea.

I asked about TurboCad because somebody was bragging about how great it was in one of the other groups I read. TurboCad is affordable like ViaCad. I was hoping. LOL.

[Perfpunch]

You could do it the 'old fashion' way in 2D! The only tricky bit is calculating the radius of the chamfered face and that's just a bit of Pythagoras half way along your rad and then a 3 point curve because the angle and radius are constant. If I were doing that in 3D I would use Inventor or Radan, just because that's what I have used in the past.
If it's a 'one off' job that will have lots of variants you could install Inventor on the 30 day trial and get it done :-) although there are some quite high hardware specs.

Good luck