Sheetmetal part looks good, flat pattern fails or is corrupted

[chazz]

This is driving me nuts (and under deadline).

I have two sheet metal parts that were made with standard sheetmetal tools/ processes and several operations ago, yielded expected flat patterns.  Now for some reason, the pattern only unfolds a few flanges and gives a strange, tapered geometry on the remaining flange in the flat pattern environment

The files are here:

M&W Pivot display (half)_Rail - Bottom

M&W Pivot display (half)_Rail - Top

 Does anyone have any idea what I did to corrupt the parts or the best strategy to repair them?  

[Warmingup1953]

Yikes! Where to begin? I had a play with Rail++Bottom and my usual tricks wouldn't wash sorry. I suspect its in the delete faces or offsets butt I cant help with a quick fix.

[TrippyLighting]

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@chazz wrote:

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 Does anyone have any idea what I did to corrupt the parts or the best strategy to repair them?  

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I understand that you are under a deadline, but frankly, this design starts with a yellow warning in the timeline and is so broken that I'd start from scratch!

One of the worst things you can do is ignore the warning messages and collect yellow icons in the timeline.

When you get the very first warning message, you should come to a full stop, determine the root cause, and fix it. 

Once you think you've fixed it, run the Modify->Compute all command. If that returns no warnings or yellow Icons, you can proceed.

[TrippyLighting · Accepted solution]

Th culprit in the timeline is this:

The current value in 0.125"

If you change that to 0.120" and roll the timeline all the way to the end it will create a flat pattern.

Having now inspected the timeline of this design, I would say your workflow is in dire need of an update.

[chazz]

Hey, thanks to @Warmingup1953 and @TrippyLighting.. I know my timeline is a mess.  I had a lot of unknowns in this and so could not neatly define everything via sketches from the start.  Sometimes I have to figure stuff out thru endless tweeting and then once I have the geometry dialed, remake everything cleanly and parametrically --which is a pain and something I was hoping to avoid in my haste.  I got everything to work now and greatly appreciate you coming to my rescue.    

I will be more mindful of warnings in future!

[TrippyLighting]

This wasn't difficult to troubleshoot. Just roll the timeline back maybe to half the timeline and see if you can still create a flat pattern.

If you can, then the problem is in the latter half of the timeline. If you cannot, then it's in the first half of the timeline.

In the problematic part of the timeline, now roll the timeline marker again to half of that part of the timeline and, again,  try to create a flat pattern...

and so forth. Very quickly, you will be able to identify the problematic timeline feature!!