Community
Inventor Forum
Welcome to Autodesk’s Inventor Forums. Share your knowledge, ask questions, and explore popular Inventor topics.
cancel
Showing results for 
Show  only  | Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Sheet metal cut with zero thickness

2 REPLIES 2
Reply
Message 1 of 3
ClintWestwood
653 Views, 2 Replies

Sheet metal cut with zero thickness

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?

Inventor 2014
HP Pavilion dv6t-6b00
Intel Core i7 2670QM
AMD Radeon HD 6490M
16gb RAM
Windows 7 64 bit
3Dconnexion SpaceExplorer
2 REPLIES 2
Message 2 of 3

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

 

Autodesk Inventor Zero Thicness Cut Sheet Metal.png

Message 3 of 3

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?

Inventor 2014
HP Pavilion dv6t-6b00
Intel Core i7 2670QM
AMD Radeon HD 6490M
16gb RAM
Windows 7 64 bit
3Dconnexion SpaceExplorer

Can't find what you're looking for? Ask the community or share your knowledge.

Post to forums  

Autodesk Design & Make Report