Sheet metal - Cut along bend

[swicksell]

One nice feature to have when making a flange would be to have a standard perforation along the bend, so it could be bent by hand. Right now I have to unfold, make a sketch and pattern, select all holes and extrude. Very time consuming if one wants this on several bends!

[Calvin]

I agree I really want this as a feature as well, especially if you can just set a rule for spacing an hole size. I use this all of the time for prototyping in several different materials. 

Is there another place we should be making feature requests ?

Thank You

Calvin

[Steinwerks]

I will toss in here that this sort of thing is very handy for relieving rolling out on bent features, IE holes that are very close to the bend line are unsupported by brake tooling and will deform substantially (especially in air bending). Not sure if there's a way to integrate this, but our designers in SW do this manually right now and I could see an automatic bend relief as a huge boon to avoiding scrap parts on first iteration.

[promm · Accepted solution]

@swicksell,

I like your suggestion and it fits good with the third workflow that we intend to address.  To recap, our first deliverable is for brake press flange creation.  We will then allow you to reuse other CAD sheet metal files and flatten.  The third workflow is to convert a component to sheet metal, where your could create a box, shell it and then cut or rip all of the edges.  My plan it to have the cut or rip tool incorporate a notch and tab option.  With your suggestion, I will look into adding notch only option.  

Regards,

Mike Prom

[Calvin]

That sounds great, I just want to be able to laser cut a design and test by hand super fast and having a perforating option along a bend would do just that.

C 

[TravisJoe]

I have done this manually in other packages as well. Usually you have to force the profile at least slightly outside the mold lines for it to not fail.

I like the idea of making warnings but allowing "improper" parts to be designed and made. Items like roller dies can allow some pretty crazy stuff to be formed on a press brake.