.ipt bend part...flatten?

[Anonymous]

When you are making an .ipt and decide to bend the component and decide to use "bend part" tool, which is similar to what you would do in a sheet metal design. Is there a way to produce a flat pattern back out of this after you bend it. For example, when producing a shop drawing on an .idw. Any information would be great. You can do it with a sheet metal design, but not if you create a basic part file and do the bend part. Thanks in advance

Dan

[JDMather]

When you used Bend Part - Inventor did exactly what you told it to do.
Inventor bent the part without changing the original length.
Your bent part is exactly the same length as your starting extrusion.

Lets look at the problem in reverse.
Suppose your desired end height was 2.715"
Using Bend Part you would first have to calculate the starting length (it would not be 11.75") to account for bend stretching of the material before bending the part.  How could the program figure out what you want before you want it?

The software you linked you create points at the desired bend locations and creates the part in finished form - as bent.
Inventor works exaclty the same way  (actually I think it could be done even easier, especially if changes are needed).

[Anonymous]

I have been following this thread as I have the same problem and would like to see Autodesk fix this issue. The software is a design software and it should be able to give the correct bend length overall total. I think this is a terribly simple issue that I and others are having and to have to get another software to do this is not right.

[Anonymous]

JD, I'm not entirely interested in arguing about why I would want to start in anything but finished form, but if a customer had a certain length of material in stock and decided on a part length (prior to bend process) to optimize quantity, it would make perfect sense to want to start with a pre-determined length of material. There is a k-factor that applies to various materials like pipe and round stock that needs to be considered when bending these. The end result of an Inventor bent part does not reflect an accurate representation based on the original length.

Thank you for your interest.

Paul, I am looking forward to learning of how this can be set up. Thank you for looking into this.

Thanks,

Chad

[JDMather]

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@Anonymous wrote:

....it should be able to give the correct bend length overall total.

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No, the problem is not correct bend length.  The problem is correct unbent flat length (bending stretches the metal) to result in the correct part.

In the example problem using sheet metal and .625 thickness rather than diameter and 2.15 desired height the starting flat would be shorter (11.633") not 11.75" with the default k-factor.  An appropriate k-factor would have to be determined for the actual process.

It would be great if Inventor did this.
But the part would be modeled as bent rather than using the Bend Part command.

[JDMather]

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@Anonymous wrote:

....but if a customer had a certain length of material in stock and decided on a part length (prior to bend process) to optimize quantity,

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That makes sense if a particular customer isn't particularly concerned with finished dimensions, but I suspect the more common scenario is a finished part dimensions.

I don't think the software you linked follows this problem description as you just stated it.

[Anonymous]

Sure, not a common scenario, but a real application none the less. I would like the part to be cut at 11.75" length, then bent, and have it be correct. That's really all I'm interested in.

Thanks

[JDMather]

That is how Fold works in Sheet Metal environment.
Should work both ways - just like sheet metal.

Sounds like we need a bent tubing environment - companion to Frame Generator.

I think we have describe the possible scenarios

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=1109794

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

That is how Fold works in Sheet Metal environment.
Should work both ways - just like sheet metal.

Sounds like we need a bent tubing environment - companion to Frame Generator.

I think we have describe the possible scenarios

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=1109794

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and the crowd goes wild! That's what I'd like to see happen.

[pauldoubet]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Paul, I'm interested in what you mentioned about automating accurate part lengths, but I'm unclear on how to do that. Could you give more detail, ie. where to input machine specs and how to setup part files...

Thanks,

Chad

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Chad,

I went back and reread my post, I was not clear on the automating sentence. What I was trying to say was if you need to do this on all or most of your parts then you should look for a software package that will do this because Inventor does not at the present time provide an automated method of doing this.

However it can be done accurately and if you only need to do this on a few parts then this is a viable work around. And if you reuse your designs and parts you only need to make changes to your parameters page and you have an accurate part for your models and you can get the correct cut length from those parameters into a parts list.

If you need an in depth explanation of what I did in the attached file please ask.

Good Luck, Paul