Sheet metal bridge connection

Cris_Bowers

I have a piece of sheet metal that has some text cut out of it. I want to keep the small interior pieces of the "a", "e", and "o" associated in the flat pattern. The only way I can think of to do this is to create a bridge. I was hoping I could just create a sketch to extrude these bridges and merge with the sheet metal model, but it isn't allowing me to do this. Is my only option to subtract the bridge sketch from the cut sketch? (I don't know if I worded that well)

NeilCooke

Probably - though you don't need to subtract. You can edit the sketch and add in the bridge as an overlapping rectangle and select which regions you want to use for the cut.

MBartlett21

@Cris_Bowers
You can also use a sheet metal tab.
It allows you to add to the sheet metal

NeilCooke

Probably - though you don't need to subtract. You can edit the sketch and add in the bridge as an overlapping rectangle and select which regions you want to use for the cut.

Cris_Bowers

That's what I ended up doing @NeilCooke. My preference would be to have it as a separate feature so I could choose to suppress the bridge in a separate configuration though.

michał_1

Hi @Cris_Bowers , this thread is a lot more convenient to speak about your workflow.
I've created a test file (a halfway done) with how I would approach sign making with Onshape and Corel:
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/2b4b67d47aef35c6dfea48be/w/246d4a82c1ce3af23d28d56b/e/06225bb6e51a2cb63e2424e9

For bridges issue, the easiest way is to cut with solids rather than with sketches.
Most imported part is a parallel workflow with same Corel design serving Onshape and LED Wizard at the same time.

There a few tricks I've used to make coop work smooth.
In Onshape to cut or extrude pick the whole sketch form Feature List, this way if you swap one DXF with a different one, cut/extrude will recover without issues (following features may fail, but it will depend, for sure do all fillets and offsets in Corel).
Tricks in Corel are:
1. Open "Onshape face" DXF, don't import.
2. Draw a bounding box around the whole design. It can be bigger than whole design, what is imported it must be centered (keyboard shortcut P)
3. Keep offsets as a smart object, just be for exporting brake them into separate vectors (Ctrl+K), after export redo to a smart object, or at least don't save as such.
4. For Onshape to read DXF properly you must break all knots, but not the bounding box. This way Onshape will see beziers as they are with no errors, but it will fail to import bounding box but will read position the way it should.

If you have further questions ask.

Cheers
Michał

MBartlett21

@Cris_Bowers
You can also use a sheet metal tab.
It allows you to add to the sheet metal

michał_1

But it might be laborious to create and constraint numerous bridges in a new, just for a metal tab, sketch.
In Corel, bridges can be lines/curves with offsets (with specific sizes) and those line/curves are single objects so applying offset is one click work.

Cris_Bowers

MBartlett21 said:

@Cris_Bowers
You can also use a sheet metal tab.
It allows you to add to the sheet metal

This is actually exactly what I needed