I Design progressive dies and tooling for metal the stamping industry. For those of you familiar with this industry I need some advise on the best approach for a strip layout using IV! I am building a model of a progressive strip (piercings, guttings, and forms.) The strip is .013 thick x .750 wide and the lead is .750 with 35 progressions. My approach with IV has been to build the strip within a single part file (not a sheet metal part). I extruded a simple .750 x 35 rectangle .013 thick, then I sketch and extrude / cut holes and many different small and complex gutting shapes (only 1 occurrence of each), then I array them as required to overlap and whittle out the progressions of the part shape to build the strip. This approach seems to work well but my part file is currently 4mb and growing! Is there a more efficient way of doing this? When I bring the strip part file into my tooling assembly drawing my system goes to its knees, chokes, and becomes sickly. A new system after the holidays is in the works but for now Im using P4 2.0 500mb ram matrox millennium 32mb video 😞
Thanks, Tom