fold a folded sheet metal with crossing bend lines

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone,

I want to create a sheet metal part in Inventor. Basically the part is a punched corrugated sheet that is folded again in an angle of 45° to the main fold. To create the corrrugated sheet I wrote a VBA skrip that creats a rectangular sheet metal, puts holes in it and folds it several times with a certain distance between the foldlines (ipt file is attached). What I want to do now is to fold the part again along a foldline at an angle of 45° to the existing foldlines, but my attemts to do so haven't been succesfull yet. In the ipt file there is a sketch with a line that is supposed to be the foldline. My problem is that I cannot use this line as a bend line for the fold feature.

I did not find a similar case in my internet research, so I hope I can find help in this forum.

Thanks in advance.

Inventor Version: Inventor Professional 2014

[mcgyvr]

can you show a picture of the real part or a drawing showing its completed/final shape?

Obviously folding across faces that are already bent like that and at different angles isn't possible in real life so....

[Anonymous]

Hi mcgyvr,

thanks for your interest in finding a solution. Unfortunately, I don't have the part available to take a picture, but I hope I can illustrate my problem with another ipt file.

In my first ipt file I accidently used the wrong sheet metal thickness. The part has a thickness of only 0.5 mm. As you can see from the second ipt file, the folds that are in 45° angle are way bigger (i.e. have a bigger bend radius and are wider apart) than the horizontal folds. The horizontal folds are more like a secondary structure and therefore it is indeed possible to manufacture this.

The resulting sheet metal should have the small secondary folds in it and also the primary big folds, so it is a combination of the first ipt file (attached to my original post) and the ipt file attached to this post.

If you can think of an alternative way to get the result, i would be happy to test it.

Cheers

[mcgyvr]

The second file is really no different than the first..

You are still asking to fold across folds which just isn't going to happen in real life..

I guess I don't understand the final geometry so I cannot help...