model to flat/sheet metal?

greg_kucinski

Hi, I have model of a boat, and I am trying to flat it out to cut seperate parts. But I have problems with generating flat sheet metal. I tried with surfaces, thickened them, enclosing model, but with no luck. Can anybody help with this?
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/c9271e93b7eca21c04fbe357/w/de734e0a4bad72939d11f9b6/e/15987005273c855fee15101f?renderMode=0&uiState=640757e1ee912e436acbf916

S1mon

There's currently no built in way to unwrap the curved portions. At Onshape live there was a demo of lofted sheet metal unfolding, but there's no announced date. 

You might be able to hack something using the unfold feature script in this document.

The bottom of the boat, which mostly seems to be made of flat faces, could be unfolded.

S1mon

Turns out you can flatten the curved sections since they have very simple curvature. What I couldn't do quickly was figure out any ways to make this into one flat pattern. I was able to make 3 sheet metal contexts. Here's my hacked version.

A few things are a little strange with your model:

1. The right plane is close to the mirror plane, but it's not the mirror plane. I would recommend starting in the future to model with one of the default planes as the mirror plane when dealing with symmetric parts. If your import isn't located in the right spot, use transform to fix it.
2. There were a couple of little slivers of material on your part that you converted to sheet metal. I cleaned these up with a couple delete face features (a very quick hack). It's better not to create these kinds of mismatches in the first place. 
3. Your sheet metal thickness was set to 1.2mm on a huge boat, and the bend radius was set to 0.1. Typically you want your bend radius to be >= 1/2 Thickness.
4. The long piece that forms the keel would be a really awkward part in real life. Probably better to bring the two main halves of the boat together for the middle of the keel, and then the green part would become two parts without the really skinny strip in the middle.

greg_kucinski

Thank you for your reply and valuable suggestions. After a few tries I finally managed to make this sheetmetal for my model. However for the imported model unfortunately not. Also I couldn't model it closer to the imported model because when I use loft or sweep function you can't after convert it to sheetmetal because of non planar surfaces.