Hi all,
I am working to model the attached autocad drawing in inventor. The part is 18ga steel, which will be cut on a laser. I am not sure how to go about creating the feature circled in red. The "C" curve outlining the feature is done using one pass of the laser. If I create a second curve at a small offset, then our nesting program will tell the laser to make 2 passes, and will burn the material. Is there a way make a cut along this curve with zero thickness, so that the laser only makes one pass?
Hi ClintWestwood,
I think you should be able to make the cut with a given thickness, and then in the drawing view of the flat pattern, select the outer lines and right click and choose Visiblity to turn those lines off. Then you can export the drawing as a DXF and you should be in good shape.
Alternately, you could just delete the lines in the DXF, if for instance you were exporting straight from the flat pattern model and were not making a drawing file.
I hope this helps.
Best of luck to you in all of your Inventor pursuits,
Curtis
http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com
Thanks for the response, Curtis.
For now, I think I will just delete the lines from the DXF. We do have our sheet metal templates configured with iLogic to export to DXF, so that will be easiest.
Another thought I had was to create an iFeature punch tool, and set the simplified representation to be the single line. This seemed to work until I added a fold feature to the part. I am attaching my part to show you what I mean. Is there a way to force the punch feature with the fold applied to it to appear identical in the flat pattern view to the punch feature without a fold applied to it?