Sheet Metal: proper settings for leather and fabric.

ThomasHertzler

Building a lightsaber with my son. I am planning on wrapping the hexagonal handle in leather or a durable fabric. I got the basic sheet metal stuff figured out, but what should I use for bend radius and k-factor?

alnis

I have a feeling that fabric and leather can probably bend at pretty sharp angles, so you could just set the bend radius really small (like .001 inches) and do a thicken part for the actual fabric/leather flat shape since it looks like you already have fillets at the corners. I would probably leave the k at the default (.5 ish) as I don't think it varies much between materials. Here's a quick/possibly incorrect example of how I would do it:

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/dd181e72b213d18d633c1f3a/v/07b6f97bdbc559f531476062/e/73b322d2b61c277dc3552415

alnis

I have a feeling that fabric and leather can probably bend at pretty sharp angles, so you could just set the bend radius really small (like .001 inches) and do a thicken part for the actual fabric/leather flat shape since it looks like you already have fillets at the corners. I would probably leave the k at the default (.5 ish) as I don't think it varies much between materials. Here's a quick/possibly incorrect example of how I would do it:

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/dd181e72b213d18d633c1f3a/v/07b6f97bdbc559f531476062/e/73b322d2b61c277dc3552415